Abstract
Research in the field of psychological aesthetics points to the appeal of stimuli which defy easy recognition by being “semantically unstable” but which still allow for creating meaning—in the ongoing process of elaborative perception or as an end product of the entire process. Such effects were reported for hidden images (Muth and Carbon, 2013) as well as Cubist artworks concealing detectable—although fragmented—objects (Muth et al., 2013). To test the stability of the relationship between semantic determinacy and appreciation across different episodic contexts, 30 volunteers evaluated an artistic movie continuously on visual determinacy or liking via the Continuous Evaluation Procedure (CEP, Muth et al., 2015b). The movie consisted of five episodes with emerging Gestalts. In the first between-participants condition, the hidden Gestalts in the movie episodes were of increasing determinacy, in the second condition, the episodes showed decreasing determinacies of hidden Gestalts. In the increasing-determinacy group, visual determinacy was rated higher and showed better predictive quality for liking than in the decreasing-determinacy group. Furthermore, when the movie started with low visual determinacy of hidden Gestalts, unexpectedly strong increases in visual determinacy had a bigger effect on liking than in the condition which allowed for weaker Gestalt recognition after having started with highly determinate Gestalts. The resulting pattern calls for consideration of the episodic context when examining art appreciation.
Highlights
A specific quality of many experiences with art is the dynamic and inconclusive generation of meaning as can be captured by subjective reports: “[T]he more I looked the more I found, the more I liked and the more I wanted to see more of that work”
We conducted an additional mixed Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with data being aggregated over frames per participant and episode to take a closer look at the evaluation of each episode on liking in the two episodic contexts
We investigated the relevance of perceptual challenge to the positive effect of semantic stability on appreciation and asked whether a semantically unstable episodic context intensifies the pleasure of creating meaning
Summary
A specific quality of many experiences with art is the dynamic and inconclusive generation of meaning as can be captured by subjective reports: “[T]he more I looked the more I found, the more I liked and the more I wanted to see more of that work” (interview with an anonymous person; Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson, 1990, p. 57). People generated insights on a variety of semantic levels when elaborating paintings and objects from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries They detected Gestalts, interpreted depicted scenes and styles, identified symbols, or reflected on their own perceptual processes. We assume here that pleasure is evoked not by easy access to meaning as such, but by the experience of dynamic meaningfulness within a semantically unstable episodic context. This article presents a study on the relevance of perceptual challenge for the positive effect of insight It investigates whether a semantically unstable episodic context intensifies the pleasure of creating meaning. An experienced perceptual challenge should provide us with the opportunity for a more rewarding insight having a positive effect on liking
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