When experienced in-person, engagement with art has been associated—in a growing body of evidence—with positive outcomes in wellbeing and mental health. This represents an exciting new field for psychology, curation, and health interventions, suggesting a widely-accessible, cost-effective, and non-pharmaceutical means of regulating factors such as mood or anxiety. However, can similar impacts be found with online presentations? If so, this would open up positive outcomes to an even-wider population—a trend accelerating due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its promise, this (...) question, and the underlying mechanisms of art interventions and impacts, has largely not been explored. Participants were asked to engage with one of two online exhibitions from Google Arts and Culture. With just 1–2 min exposure, both improved negative mood, state-anxiety, loneliness, and wellbeing. Stepdown analysis suggested the changes can be explained primarily via negative mood, while improvements in mood correlated with aesthetic appraisals and cognitive-emotional experience of the exhibition. However, no difference was found between exhibitions. We discuss the findings in terms of applications and targets for future research. (shrink)

Visiting a museum and seeing an original artwork can be a special experience. We use a survey and a set of hypothetical questions to explore how such experience would be affected by changes in how the artwork is seen. In a first study, participants imagined that they had travelled to see a painting that they particularly like. They discover that it is impossible to directly see the original painting. Three alternatives are offered: seeing an optical reflection (using a mirror), seeing (...) a video screening (a closed-circuit camera) or seeing a reproduction. In all cases it is made clear that the size, brightness, and resolution will match that of the original. In addition, these options could be within the same room as the original, in the room next door, or in a different building. Results show that physical distance did not affect significantly the responses. However, there was an overall preference for seeing a reproduction as opposed to an optical or digital image. Contrary to the idea that the original is always superior to a copy, many people felt that a direct view of a copy is a preferable experience than an indirect view. The second study was focused directly on the comparison between a mirror and a monitor. Here we highlighted the fact that for the mirror light coming from the mirror originated from the painting. Data were collected in Britain and in China. In both cases there was a clear preference for the mirror over the monitor. (shrink)

The role of titles in perception of visual art is a topic of interesting discussions that brings together artists, curators, and researchers. Titles provide contextual cues and guide perception. They can be particularly useful when paintings include semantic violations that make them challenging for viewers, especially viewers lacking expert knowledge. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of titles and semantic violations on eye movements. A total of 127 participants without expertise in visual art viewed 40 paintings (...) with and without semantic violations in one of three conditions: untitled, consistent titles and inconsistent titles. After each painting was viewed participants also rated liking and understanding. Our results suggest that titles affect the way paintings are viewed: both titled conditions were associated with shorter first fixation duration, longer saccade durations, and amplitudes and higher dynamic entropy than the untitled conditions. Titles were fixated on more frequently when presented alongside paintings with semantic violations than paintings without violations, and the percentage of fixations to titles was particularly high in the case of paintings with double inconsistencies. Also, we found that semantic violations attracted attention early on, whereas titles received attention later and inconsistencies in titles were processed even later. Finally, semantic violations were associated with higher dynamic entropy than paintings without violations. Our results demonstrate the importance of titles for processing of artworks, especially artworks that present a challenge for the viewers. (shrink)

While art is omnipresent in human history, the neural mechanisms of how we perceive, value and differentiate art has only begun to be explored. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies suggested that art acts as secondary reward, involving brain activity in the ventral striatum and prefrontal cortices similar to primary rewards such as food. However, potential similarities or unique characteristics of art-related neuroscience remain elusive, also because of a lack of adequate experimental tools: the available collections of art stimuli often lack (...) standard image definitions and normative ratings. Therefore, we here provide a large set of well-characterized, novel art images for use as visual stimuli in psychological and neuroimaging research. The stimuli were created using a deep learning algorithm that applied different styles of popular paintings on ordinary animal, plant and object images which were drawn from established visual stimuli databases. The novel stimuli represent mundane items with artistic properties with proposed reduced dimensionality and complexity compared to paintings. In total, 2,332 novel stimuli are available open access as “art.pics” database at https://osf.io/BTWNQ/ with standard image characteristics that are comparable to other common visual stimuli material in terms of size, variable color distribution, complexity, intensity and valence, measured by image software analysis and by ratings derived from a human experimental validation study [n = 1,296, age 30.2 ± 8.8 y.o.]. The experimental validation study further showed that the art.pics elicit a broad and significantly different variation in subjective value ratings as well as in recognizability, arousal and valence across different art styles and categories. Researchers are encouraged to study the perception, processing and valuation of art images based on the art.pics database which also enables real reward remuneration of the rated stimuli and a direct comparison to other rewards from e.g., food or money.Key Messages: We provide an open access, validated and large set of novel stimuli of standardized art images including normative rating data to be used for experimental research. Reward remuneration in experimental settings can be easily implemented for the art.pics by e.g., handing out the stimuli to the participants, as done in the presented validation task. Experimental validation showed that the art.pics’ images elicit a broad and significantly different variation in subjective value ratings across different art styles and categories, while size, color and complexity characteristics remained comparable to other visual stimuli databases. (shrink)