tailieunhanh - Entitling art: Influence of title information on understanding and appreciation of paintings

If understanding and grasping the meaning is essential, as proposed in the model, then information which helps to interpret the image must affect aesthetic processing. Here we present a study in which we investigate how verbal information affects cognitive and affec- tive components in the processing of abstract and representational artworks. However, the temporal structure of the model is not yet clear. Although Bachmann and Vipper (1983) showed that some information in artworks is available after short presentation times, it might well be that understanding an artwork requires some time. . | ELSEVIER Available online at SCIENCE DIRECT acta psychologies Acta Psychologica 121 2006 176-198 locate actpsy Entitling art Influence of title information on understanding and appreciation of paintings Helmut Leder a b Claus-Christian Carbon a Ai-Leen Ripsas b a Faculty of Psychology University of Vienna Liebiggasse 5 1010 Vienna Austria b Department of History and Cultural Sciences Special Research Division Aesthetics Freie Universitat Berlin Altensteinstr 2-4 14195 Berlin Germany Received 21 September 2004 received in revised form 17 August 2005 accepted 18 August 2005 Available online 11 November 2005 Abstract There is evidence that presenting titles together with artworks affects their processing. We investigated whether elaborative and descriptive titles change the appreciation and understanding of paintings. Under long presentation times 90 s in Experiment 1 testing representative and abstract paintings elaborative titles increased the understanding of abstract paintings but not their appreciation. In order to test predictions concerning the time course of understanding and aesthetic appreciation Leder H. Belke B. Oeberst A. Augustin D. 2004 . A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology 95 4 489-508 in Experiment 2 abstract paintings were presented under two presentation times. For short presentation times 1s descriptive titles increased the understanding more than elaborative titles whereas for medium presentation times 10 s elaborative titles increased the understanding more than descriptive titles. Thus with artworks a presentation time of around 10 s might be needed to assign a meaning beyond the mere description. Only at medium presentation times did the participants with more art knowledge have a better understanding of the paintings than participants with less art knowledge. Thus it seems that art knowledge becomes significant if there is sufficient time to assign a .