The "style scheme" grounds perception of paintings.

Full Abstract

We studied the formation of style scheme (identification of the style that characterizes an artist) presenting 100 participants aesthetic visual stimuli. Participants were Spanish university students who volunteered:
72 women, 28 men of mean age 22.8 yr. Among those 50 were enrolled in History of Art and 50 students in Psychology. Stimuli belonged to different categories--High Art (pictures of well-known artists, like Van Gogh)/Popular Art (decorative pictures like Christmas postcards) and Representational (pictures with explicit meaning content, like a landscape)/Abstract (pictures without explicit meaning content, like Pollock's colored stains). Analysis using Signal Detection Theory techniques focused on how participants discriminate representational and abstract pictures. With High Art stimuli, participants can better discriminate representational paintings than abstract ones. However, the difference in discrimination between representational and abstract pictures diminishes among participants studying History of Art. It seems that prior education in art favors forming style schemes and to some extent enables the participant to detect the "meaning" in High Art abstract paintings.

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Author information

Author/s: Cela-Conde, Camilo J (CJ); Marty, Gisèle (G); Munar, Enric (E); Nadal, Marcos (M); Burges, Lucrecia (L);

Affiliation: Laboratory of Human Systematics, University of Balearic Islands, Carretera de Valldemosa, km. 7.5, 07071 Palma de Mallorca, Spain. cela-conde@uib.es

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Perceptual and motor skills (Percept Mot Skills), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Aug; vol 95 (issue 1) : pp 91-100

Dates: Created 2002/10/07; Completed 2003/02/13; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12365279, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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