Using the Aesthetic Triad to Enhance Art Engagement (Laboratory)

This experiment aims to understand how training for the Aesthetic Triad changes how individuals evaluate artworks. Specifically, we ask: how do we meaningfully deepen engagement beyond initial impressions? We know that viewing artwork has the potential to catalyze prototypical aesthetic emotions, epistemic emotions, and amusement/emotionally activating emotions. In fact, retrospective self-report assessment highlights the multidimensionality of aesthetic experience beyond pleasure to include suspense, emotional engagement, and narrative appreciation. Yet, a typical artwork engagement lasts a mere 27 seconds. Deeper, and longer, interactions are ideal, because they tend to lead to more confidence, empathy, and personal meaning, which leads to shifts in both emotional valuation and conceptual understanding. Such interactions have been shown to be catalyzed through slow-looking, and thus it is reasonable to assume they can also be facilitated through other directive framing too – in particular, the Triad-based training video we plan to show our experimental subjects. In the Triad-training condition, a 5 minute video describes to experimental subjects the sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge systems. By providing a cognitive scaffolding for them to articulate their thoughts about the 8 artworks (each shown for 3 minutes in a random order) in front of them, this will deepen their aesthetic engagement above the control subjects who have not been provided a theoretically-based framework and will only watch and interpret the artworks without any assistance. We hypothesize the following about each of the three systems. 1. Sensory-motor engagement will increase, with participants noticing more detail that extends beyond basic perceptual reckonings. 2. Emotion-valuation will be deeper, with emotions indicating a deeper level of engagement being shown. 3. Meaning-knowledge will be more prominent, with more epistemic emotions being selected and more additional comments being made by our participants.