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Abstract
Esthetic experience is the result of the coordination of different cognitive processes. It has been widely reported that top-down processes of orienting of attention interact with bottom-up perceptual facilitation occurring during esthetic experience of artworks. Here we use whole-part ambiguity as a tool to test the effect of global and local prime on esthetic appreciation of complex visual artworks. To this aim 139 healthy young individuals completed an esthetic judgment of Arcimboldo’s ambiguous artworks, which were preceded by a local or global prime. Their perceptual style was also assessed using a Navon task. We found that local prime significantly enhanced esthetic appreciation of ambiguous portraits. Also, we found that prime level interacted with individual’s perceptual style: participants showing local perceptual style liked less ambiguous portraits when they were preceded by global prime. Overall, the present findings shed some light on the processes involved in esthetic experience, pointing towards a pivotal role of re-direction of attention towards perceptual features of the artworks and its interaction with individual factors, such as perceptual style.
Highlights
Esthetic attitude has been proposed to involve an intentional shift from an automatic visuo-perceptual processing to an “esthetic state of mind,” which is more explicitly directed towards the sensory experience (Cupchik, 1992; Cupchik & Winston, 1996)
Part– whole ambiguity, which is a specific case of perceptual ambiguity, leads to two possible perceptual interpretations, too. It is the main feature of the collection of Arcimboldo’s portraits, which can be interpreted as an array of objects or a face. Both behavioral (Boccia et al, 2014) and neuroimaging (Boccia et al, 2015) investigations support the idea that esthetic appreciation of Arcimboldo’s ambiguous artworks is prompted by appreciation of local parts: individuals with local perceptual style, namely those who were faster in detecting the local level of hierarchical stimuli such as Navon letters (Navon, 1977), highly appreciated Arcimboldo’s portraits and judged them as more ambiguous (Boccia et al, 2014); content-dependent brain area of the ventral visual stream selectively activated during face perception was less activated when participants enjoyed Arcimboldo’s ambiguous portraits (Boccia et al, 2015)
We investigated whether local and global prime affected esthetic appreciation of ambiguous artworks showing wholepart ambiguity and whether this effect interacted with perceptual style
Summary
Esthetic attitude has been proposed to involve an intentional shift from an automatic visuo-perceptual processing to an “esthetic state of mind,” which is more explicitly directed towards the sensory experience (Cupchik, 1992; Cupchik & Winston, 1996). Both behavioral (Boccia et al, 2014) and neuroimaging (Boccia et al, 2015) investigations support the idea that esthetic appreciation of Arcimboldo’s ambiguous artworks is prompted by appreciation of local parts: individuals with local perceptual style, namely those who were faster in detecting the local level of hierarchical stimuli such as Navon letters (Navon, 1977), highly appreciated Arcimboldo’s portraits and judged them as more ambiguous (Boccia et al, 2014); content-dependent brain area of the ventral visual stream selectively activated during face perception (i.e., fusiform face area) was less activated when participants enjoyed Arcimboldo’s ambiguous portraits (Boccia et al, 2015). Based on the previous studies mentioned above, which suggest that biasing the orientation of visual attention towards the local level of percept would prompt the esthetic pleasure arising from watching ambiguous artworks, we predicted that local prime increased esthetic appreciation of ambiguous artwork and that this effect was further affected by PS
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