Context Effects on Beauty Ratings of Painted Artworks: Contrast, Contrast, Everywhere!
Abstract
To explore how context influences the subjective beauty of painted artworks, I presented average-beauty target paintings in the context of either low-beauty or high-beauty context paintings. Experiment 1 also factorially varied whether target and context paintings were of similar or different styles, were presented sequentially or simultaneously, and whether 2 or 10 paintings were rated. Target paintings were consistently deemed more beautiful when presented with low-beauty (vs. high-beauty) context paintings. This contrast effect was not modulated by the other three factors. In Experiments 2a-c, context beauty again yielded contrast effects, even though a variety of methods were used to try to elicit assimilation effects. Experiment 3a-b examined whether the “contrast everywhere” pattern might be due to participants not perceiving target and context paintings as similar. Consistent with that possibility, similarity ratings for context-target pairs were generally low, even though they were higher for similar (vs. different) style targets, and for simultaneous (vs. sequential) presentation. My results provided some support, and some challenges, for a selective accessibility model and a range-frequency model. Critically, both models will need to better specify how similarity is assessed. To better elucidate how context influences stimulus evaluation, I discuss the need to collect independent measures of similarity perception in future research.
Description
Keywords
Psychology--Cognitive
Citation
Tousignant, C. (2016). Context Effects on Beauty Ratings of Painted Artworks: Contrast, Contrast, Everywhere! (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25438