Previous research has shown that artists employ flexible attentional strategies during offline perceptual tasks. The current study explored visual processing online, by tracking the eye movements of artists and non-artists (n=65) while they produced representational drawings of photographic stimuli. The findings revealed that it is possible to differentiate artists from non-artists on the basis of

Western European and East Asian cultures show marked differences in aesthetic appreciation of the visual arts. East Asian aesthetics are often associated with a holistic focus on balance and harmony, in contrast to Western aesthetics, which often focus on the expression of the individual. In this study, we examined whether cultural differences also exist in relation to the aesthetics of dance. Japanese

In folk psychology experiences of ugliness are associated with the negation of beauty and disorder, but empirical evidence is remarkably rare. Here, participants (called informed) took 102 photographs of ugly landscapes and urban scenes and reflected on their experiences. Later, participants naïve to the intentional ugliness in the photographs rated landscapes higher than informed participants. The

This empirical study examines how philosophical work on the sublime relates to contemporary psychological work on awe. We operationalized several aspects of the sublime drawing from prominent philosophical theories and analyzed them in relation to three different measures of awe: the modified Differential Emotions Scale (mDES), the awe sub-scale of the Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES), and

Fractals are patterns that show self-similarity at different levels of scale. Typically they appear in nature and this degree of similarity is approximate or statistical. However, artificial or exact fractals have also been studied and the advantage of these stimuli is the ability to more carefully control the relationships that occur across various hierarchies. In two experiments we studied the perceived

This paper investigated the impact of the type of title on the price of the artwork effects using the hammer price of the paintings auctioned in Korea during a two-year period from December 2017 to November 2019. The results of the analysis showed that a descriptive title had a negative effect on the prices fetched, whereas a more elaborate title had a positive effect on auction prices. Also, it was

Artwork is increasingly being created by machines through algorithms with little or no input from humans. Yet, very little is known about people’s attitudes and evaluations of artwork generated by machines. The current study investigates (a) whether individuals are able to accurately differentiate human-made artwork from AI-generated artwork and (b) the role of attribution knowledge (i.e., information

The present study examined the effects of affective context on evaluation of facial expression of emotion in portrait paintings. Pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral context photographs were presented prior to target portrait paintings. The participants’ task was to view the portrait painting and choose an emotion label that fit the subject of the painting. The results from Experiment 1 indicated that

Poems, as aesthetic objects, generate a subjective experience, which can be different for different readers. In this paper, we propose a method to quantify these subjective experiences. We gave participants three parallel excerpts and asked them to describe, in free text, the perceived emotive qualities of these excerpts. The descriptions were analysed quantitatively according to the dimensions of

The factors influencing poetry’s aesthetic appreciation are largely unknown. Some studies have reported features that affect the aesthetic appreciation of poetry. This study sought to determine which states and traits predict the aesthetic appeal of haiku poetry. We recruited 277 participants to rate 36 haiku on five characteristics: imagery vividness, stimulus valence, arousal, valence of felt emotion

Given the ubiquity of art in almost all human societies, why is it that participation in the arts is so diverse? To address this question, the present study examined demographic and motivational variables as predictors of arts attendance in a sample of 480 participants, and whether any significant differences appear among attendees at different venues. The ordinal logistic regression identified income

Graffiti art is a controversial art form, and as such there has been little empirical work assessing its aesthetic value. A recent study examined image statistical properties of text-based artwork and revealed that images of text contain less global structure relative to fine detail compared to artworks. However, previous research did not include graffiti tags or murals, which reside in the space between

Intelligence is a key psychological feature associated to emotion and perception. Listening to music is often linked to emotional experience and sensation seeking (SS), traits that have been shown overall negatively correlated with intelligence. In a sample of 53 musicians and 54 non-musicians, we assessed the use of music for experiencing strong emotions through the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR)

In some creative domains, it is easy to make performance visible. For example, musician can be observed while they perform. In other domains, such as sculpting, less is known about the creation process. The objective of the present study was to analyze how professional artists and students in sculpting differ in their perception and in their creation processes as well as how perception and creation

In this study, we compared the psychological and psychophysiological benefits of coloring to drawing as a means of distraction versus expression. Participants were 60 undergraduates who experienced an anxiety induction. We then randomly assigned them to color a design, draw a design (distract), or draw to express their negative thoughts and feelings. Anxiety was measured before and after the anxiety

This article designs an empirical methodology to measure the perceived value of intangible cultural heritage, specifically using the significant example of flamenco. Such methodology is divided into three stages: interviews with experts, to lay out the flamenco creation process and to identify the aspects, which influenced its value; a double system survey for spectators and experts, which determines

Art-based programming has been proposed to be one of the most promising approaches for teaching creativity because it provides meaningful learning through a pleasurable activity. We describe a course for children that sought to increase both creativity skills (problem finding and idea generation) and emotion skills (abilities to perceive one’s emotions accurately, use one’s emotions to guide creative

Empirical aesthetics is associated with two research questions: How the mind generally assigns value to sensory stimuli and how it responds specifically to art objects. Researchers have debated whether these phenomena share enough to warrant being collapsed into a single field. To ask how these particular questions came to be associated with aesthetics, we conducted Google Ngram analyses over a corpus

Attention is drawn to the program of the Psychology of the Arts Conference held in Cardiff in 1983, which incorporated the eighth Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. A link is provided to the hitherto unpublished conference program. Three features of the program are highlighted: the strength of the psychology of music, the interest in children’s art, and the absence of

There is a long history of studies of shape preference using simple abstract two-dimensional shapes. The evidence has confirmed a preference for symmetry, high contrast, and smoothness over asymmetry, low contrast, and angularity. However, the evidence about the role of culture and expertise is inconclusive. We asked a group of 56 expert designers (studying at the IUAV) to draw seven objects on paper

This study investigated the need for uniqueness, visual aesthetic sensitivity, and their correlation. To investigate these variables, we asked 71 participants to complete the German adaptation of the Need for Uniqueness scale (NfU-G) and the Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test (VAST)—including the VAST-Revised (VAST-R). The NfU-G measures the need to set oneself apart from others, whereas the VAST(-R)

The idea of art as a language of emotion has historical roots. This study asked if color, as an integrated pictorial element in Himalayan art, can communicate the intended emotions to North American viewers. To investigate the extent to which those emotions are congruent cross-culturally, participants were assigned to four conditions of varying levels of informativeness, based on whether they did or

Art education includes activating two sources for developmental change. One resource that can be called upon to promote developmental change is external to the child, encouraged by teaching and by exposure to artworks. The other resource acts as a pacemaker internal to the child’s own cognitive development, facilitated by some conception of the minds of artists and viewers. Studies show how children

Art and metaphor both seem unnecessary for survival yet are unlikely to be spandrels given their ubiquity and apparent value. We discuss how art and metaphor play a similar, important role in cognition. Specifically, both are communications that are neither true nor false and so convey information by drawing attention to a limited isomorphism between target and source, a relationship that allows for

Although this article’s author and Ellen Winner completed their graduate training at Harvard’s now extinct Department of Psychology and Social Relations in the 1970s, they pursued divergent paths that only intersected on a few critical occasions, especially two discomfiting events during scientific meetings (the first event for her and the second for the author). Yet these distressing events stimulated

Gifted children are an extremely precious resource. But what does it mean to be gifted? Ellen Winner has devoted much of her career to addressing this question. In this essay, I argue that our society misdefines giftedness, placing undue emphasis on analytical skills. Moreover, the problem is getting worse. Amplifying factors in society are narrowing rather than broadening our definition of giftedness

In this article, the authors describe over 20 years of work with Ellen Winner at Project Zero, a research and development group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This included a cross-arts curriculum and assessment project aimed at practitioners (ArtsPROPEL, 1989–1995), 10 meta-analytic syntheses of the effects of arts learning on nonarts achievement (REAP, 1997–2001), and an observational

This article takes a look at 624 neighborhood maps, drawn by students aged 8 to 18 years from 24 countries, between 2017 and 2018. The maps were made as part of an online cultural exchange program called Out of Eden Learn, developed at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In honor of Dr. Ellen Winner, a preliminary analysis of the maps is offered using The Studio Thinking framework

As Winner (1982) argued, we “read” a lot in to pictures, aptly via metaphor—which applies to unreal stretch in flying-gallop—but inaccurately with perspective—we underestimate compression of the azimuth.

This article discusses the important scholarly contributions to our understandings of creativity, education, and the arts. I describe many important contributions, beginning with Dr. Ellen Winner’s foundational studies of child development and the arts in the 1970s and 1980s. I identify several common themes throughout her career. First, I characterize her work as problem finding in nature—exploring

This discussion of Habits of Mind is rooted in Ellen Winner and colleagues’ groundbreaking research on the skills and dispositions taught in visual arts, music, and theater classrooms in the United States. The Habits students are learning in these creative contexts have applications to other domains, such as the sciences and everyday life. The philosophical origins of Habits of Mind are discussed in

Not every worthy scholar receives a Festschrift (literally: a celebratory book); circumstances can delay or prevent its appearance. And not every Festschrift lives up to expectation: Such collections can range from clutches of articles that were rejected from journals to sets of articles that mostly rehash the author’s own work, a sort of “mirror,” or “selfie” Festschrift. Happily, this impressive

Today as in the past, artists often produce works of art to foster civic agendas of one sort or another, sometimes affirming and sometimes critiquing contemporary attitudes. To what degree is engaging with civically inflected art likely to have the desired impact? We develop an analogy between the work of Ellen Winner and colleagues questioning the impact of studying art on performance in other academic

This report is a contribution to Ellen Winner’s Festschrift from a very fond former student and collaborator.

Research on children’s drawing has focused primarily on the challenges they face in depicting reality on a two-dimensional surface. As they get older, their depictions become increasingly realistic. However, the development of drawing also reflects children’s increasing ability to surmount another challenge, notably the constraints imposed by what they know about reality. In the course of development

Almost all art is owned, and this affects how people interact with art and think about it. At the same time, people’s beliefs about artwork and artistic creation may affect their thinking about ownership. This article raises several questions about ways that ownership and art may matter for one another and reviews recent findings from experiments on adults and young children that suggest preliminary

Considerable research on music psychology indicates correlations between musical preferences and individual differences in personality, between the various uses of music and personality traits, and...

The ability to envision what is not directly seen is important in the visual arts, since artists do more than reproduce what they see. Such envisioning requires visual imagery abilities. In this st...

Our understanding of aesthetic appreciation has undergone a profound change during the past 20 years, as a result of the ability to study the human brain through neuroimaging. A number of findings cast into doubt important tenets of previous theories and models. Specifically, neuroscientific evidence suggests that aesthetic appreciation is not a distinct neurobiological process assessing certain objects

The Narration/Coordination model is presented as a unifying model of the arts with regard to psychological processing and social functions. The model proposes a classification of the arts into the two broad categories of the narrative arts and the coordinative arts. The narrative arts function to tell stories, often to promote social learning through the modeling of prosocial behaviors. The coordinative

Studies found that genuine artworks viewed in a museum receive higher appreciation ratings than reproductions in the laboratory. Due to the mutual variation of context and genuineness, these studies were not able to disentangle these factors. A study designed by Brieber, Leder, and Nadal to systematically differentiate between these two variables did not find an effect of context or genuineness. To

The ability to perceive repetition and change in rhythm is fundamental to music understanding. How is this ability affected by other musical dimensions, such as pitch? We compared the perception of rhythmic repetition and change in rhythm-only stimuli versus rhythm-and-pitch stimuli. A sample of 357 participants, aged from 6 to 22 years, performed Same (repetition) versus Different (change) judgments

Noninvasive brain stimulation methods, like transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial electrical stimulation, are largely employed in cognitive neuroscience to investigate brain–behavior relationships. This review offers an overview of mechanisms of actions of transcranial magnetic stimulation and different types of transcranial electrical stimulation and considers recent studies that have

Few classic philosophers are as popular as Immanuel Kant. Kant’s ideas seem to be used ubiquitously in contemporary aesthetics discussions. Here, we critically review the way his ideas are being applied in empirical research. We focus on the four moments presented in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (first published in 1790) and show that Kant’s precise (and sometimes counter-intuitive) use of

How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how audiovisual congruency influences continuous aesthetic and psychophysiological responses to contemporary dance. Two groups of spectators watched a recorded dance performance that included the performer’s steps, breathing, and vocalizations but no music. Dance and sound were paired either as recorded or

Aesthetic appreciation of pictures partly depends on the perceptual balance of their elements. This relation has also been supported by objective measures predicting balance ratings as well as preference. Gershoni and Hochstein, however, applied these measures to Japanese calligraphies and failed to find such a relation, which questions the generality of these balance concepts. In our first experiment

Two experiments were conducted to examine sequential context effects on judgments of liking for artistic photographs. In Experiment 1, target photographs were preceded in a sequence by context photographs prerated for liking. The results showed that viewing time and response time for targets increased when preceded by highly liked context photographs. However, ratings of liking for targets were unaffected

Feeling like crying is a common response to music. Recent work suggests two forms of aesthetic crying: an awe-inspired, positive kind and a distressed, sad kind. Besides their emotional tone, what differentiates these experiences? The present research examined the context and subjective musical content of aesthetic crying. A sample of 961 adults described the emotional tone, musical features, and social

Our experiment, conducted in an art gallery, was designed to investigate how educational classes, provided for children of different ages, affect their (a) esthetic judgment and (b) interpretation of contemporary art. We found that curator-led tours and art workshops affected the ratings given by the youngest children (aged 4–5 years), while interpretation was influenced by contextual cues only in

The goal of the research was to determine whether artworks said to be created by famous artists were appreciated more than the same artworks attributed to nonfamous artists. Analysis indicated that the works attributed to famous artists were more appreciated than the identical works attributed to nonfamous artists: The works were liked more and judged more interesting and beautiful (all p values < 

Scientific disciplines as diverse as biology, physics, and psychological aesthetics regard symmetry as one of the most important principles in nature and one of the most powerful determinants of beauty. However, symmetry has a low standing in the arts and humanities. This difference in the valuation of symmetry is a remarkable illustration of the gap between the two cultures. To close this gap, we

Children’s drawings are implicated in their emotional, cognitive, artistic, and semiotic development, raising the question of how early educators may best facilitate drawing development. This study compared three activities to determine their relative efficacy in promoting children’s drawing. Seventy-seven preschoolers from a Head Start program were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: storybook

Studies have shown that life drawing can have positive effects on body image in adults. Here, we examined the effect of life drawing in a sample of British adolescents (N = 14). Participants completed measures of positive body image, appearance investment, and self-esteem before attending three life drawing sessions over 7 weeks. Following the final session, they completed the same quantitative measures

Nonvocal musical instruments like the oboe, cello, and violin, have been described as resembling the human voice. However, much of the evidence is based on historical reports and hearsay. In this study, 174 participants rated instruments according to how much they sounded like the human voice. Analysis revealed that no nonvocal instrument was rated as being voicelike, with moderate mean ratings for

The film editor’s task in refining film edits by frame-by-frame matching is an important undertaking in perceptual precision. This article investigates whether the failure of a few frames jeopardizes the perceived continuity of a film. Thirty-three Swedish students were eye-tracked while watching two versions of the same documentary film sequence; one version was completed to continuity satisfaction

The aim of this research was to investigate the extent to which psychological factors interfere with conscious rational problem-solving in constructing a cinematic narrative’s causal connections during film viewing. Talk-aloud protocol was used to record subjects’ verbal reactions during watching films. Viewers’ texts were analyzed to determine the type and the quantity of causal inferences. This enabled

Daniel Berlyne's inverted-U model remains a simple, well-supported explanation of music preference as a function of collative variables. However, after reviewing the literature, we identified a gap in studies examining preference for music exhibiting collative variable levels that were classified as extreme. A small number of studies using examples of extreme music suggested a floor-effect for preference

This study explores how accompanying text affects the way an individual views and interprets a painting. We randomly assigned participants to view 20 paintings from the classical era with factual information, contextualized background information, or no information displayed next to them. We then recorded their visual gaze using an eye-tracking device and asked them to evaluate the paintings. The results

While the benefit of distraction over expression as an emotion regulation strategy has been shown, it is not clear whether this benefit generalizes across a range of activities. To find out, we compared distraction versus expression in drawing, writing, talking, and thinking to oneself. We induced a negative mood in 160 participants by asking them to visualize an upsetting experience. Participants

Researchers in the evolutionary aesthetics tradition have suggested that people prefer shiny objects because glossiness connotes water. We consider some methodological issues in past research and present an experiment that manipulated the glossiness of metal objects. Young adults (n = 134) viewed silver coins that were either dull or in “brilliant uncirculated” condition as well as copper cylinders