Summary: When we see a painting, we rate its aesthetic value based upon other artwork we have just seen.
Source: University of Sydney
When we pass through an art gallery, what determines our idea of beauty? A University of Sydney study of how people rate the aesthetics of each artwork shows part of our aesthetic assessment is due to the painting you saw a few moments before.
The research, led by PhD student Ms Sujin Kim in the School of Psychology, is published in the Journal of Vision. It shows that we don’t appreciate every painting in isolation. Instead, we carry a bias from the artwork just seen.
This bias is not the contrast effect you might intuitively think. A beautiful painting does not make the next one look less attractive but makes it more attractive.
The study, completed under the supervision of Professor David Alais from the University of Sydney and Professor David Burr from the University of Florence, Italy, involved presenting a sequence of 40 paintings to 24 observers who were asked to rate each one using a slider to indicate how aesthetically appealing or attractive it was. The paintings were depicting scenery or still life.
“While it is often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this is not the whole story – it partly depends on what was recently seen,” Professor Alais said.
The first question the 24 observers were asked to respond to was whether they rated each painting independently of what they had just seen. To do this, the sequence was presented 20 times with each run having a different random order. In this way, a given painting was rated 20 times, but with a different random sequence preceding it. The data was clear: observers don’t rate each painting consistently but are biased by what they just saw.
“Many people naively suppose a kind of ‘contrast effect’ whereby a painting may look more attractive if it follows an unattractive painting,” Professor Alais said. “The surprising result was that the bias was a positive one: paintings were rated higher following an attractive painting, or lower, following unattractive ones.”
The research refers to this effect as “serial dependence”, which describes a systemic bias towards recent past experience. Previous studies have found, many stimulus attributes – including orientation, numerosity, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness – are systematically biased towards recent past experience. “Perhaps art curators have known all along about the bias towards the recent past,” Professor Alais said. “They often keep the best pieces for last and build up to it. Our study shows this would ensure an accumulating effect and guarantee a big finish.”
Source:
University of Sydney
Media Contacts:
Elissa Blake – University of Sydney
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Open access
“Attraction to the recent past in aesthetic judgments: A positive serial dependence for rating artwork”. Sujin Kim; David Burr; David Alais.
Journal of Vision doi:10.1167/19.12.19.
Abstract
Attraction to the recent past in aesthetic judgments: A positive serial dependence for rating artwork
Visual perception can be systematically biased towards the recent past. Many stimulus attributes—including orientation, numerosity, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness—are systematically biased towards recent past experience. This phenomenon has been termed serial dependence. In the current study, we tested whether serial dependence occurs for aesthetic ratings of artworks. A set of 100 paintings depicting scenery and still life was collected from online archives. For each participant, 40 paintings were randomly selected from the set, and presented sequentially 20 times in random order. Serial dependence was quantified for each observer by measuring how their rating response on each trial depended on the attractiveness of the previous trial. The data were pooled across participants and fitted with a Bayesian model of serial dependence. Results showed that the current painting earned significantly higher aesthetic ratings when participants viewed a more attractive painting on the previous trial, compared to when they viewed a less attractive one. The magnitude of serial dependence was greatest when the attractiveness distance between consecutive paintings was relatively close. The effect held both for 1 s exposure times, and for brief 250 ms exposures (followed by a mask). These findings show that aesthetic judgments are not sequentially independent, showing that positive serial dependencies are not limited to low-level perceptual judgments.
