RESEARCH ARTICLE Reappraising Abstract Paintings after Exposure to Background Information

Can knowledge help viewers when they appreciate an artwork? Experts ’ judgments of the aesthetic value of a painting often differ from the estimates of naïve viewers, and this phe-nomenon is especially pronounced in the aesthetic judgment of abstract paintings. We com-pared the changes in aesthetic judgments of naïve viewers while they were progressively exposed to five pieces of background information. The participants were asked to report their aesthetic judgments of a given painting after each piece of information was presented. We found that commentaries by the artist and a critic significantly increased the subjective aes-thetic ratings. Does knowledge enable experts to attend to the visual features in a painting and to link it to the evaluative conventions, thus potentially causing different aesthetic judg-ments? To investigate whether a specific pattern of attention is essential for the knowledge-based appreciation, we tracked the eye movements of subjects while viewing a painting with a commentary by the artist and with a commentary by a critic. We observed that critics ’ com-mentaries directed the viewers ’ attention to the visual components that were highly relevant to the presented commentary. However, attention to specific features of a painting was not necessary for increasing the subjective aesthetic judgment when the artists ’ commentary was presented. Our results suggest that at least two different cognitive mechanisms may be involved in knowledge- guided aesthetic judgments while viewers reappraise a painting