This paper has a rather audacious purpose: to present a comprehensive theory explaining, and further providing hypotheses for the empirical study of, the multiple ways by which people respond to art. Despite common agreement that interaction with art can be based on a compelling, and occasionally profound, psychological experience, the nature of these interactions is still under debate. We propose a model, The Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception (VIMAP), with the goal of resolving the multifarious processes that can occur when we perceive and interact with visual art. Specifically, we focus on the need to integrate bottom-up, artwork-derived processes, which have formed the bulk of previous theoretical and empirical assessments, with top-down mechanisms which can describe how individuals adapt or change within their processing experience, and thus how individuals may come to particularly moving, disturbing, transformative, as well as mundane, results. This is achieved by combining several recent lines of theoretical research into a new integrated approach built around three processing checks, which we argue can be used to systematically delineate the possible outcomes in art experience. We also connect our model's processing stages to specific hypotheses for emotional, evaluative, and physiological factors, and address main topics in psychological aesthetics including provocative reactions-chills, awe, thrills, sublime-and difference between "aesthetic" and "everyday" emotional response. Finally, we take the needed step of connecting stages to functional regions in the brain, as well as broader core networks that may coincide with the proposed cognitive checks, and which taken together can serve as a basis for future empirical and theoretical art research.

Being interested in art and having knowledge about art are arguably central dimensions in art experience and two of the most important individual differences when assessing how people process or respond to art. Nonetheless, there is to date no reliable and validated measure of these dimensions. In this paper, we present the Vienna Art Interest & Art Knowledge Questionnaire (VAIAK) as a tool for researchers to measure both art interest and knowledge of their participants in studies involving visual art. In a 3-stage validation process, we first developed the questionnaire. Second, we pretested it qualitatively and quantitatively with a sample of lay people as well as art history students and art professionals. Finally, we conducted a large-scale validation study (Ͼ600 participants) with both lay people (psychology students) and art history students, where we present evidence regarding relations to other variables and internal structure as well as the ability to discriminate between relative lay people and experts. Our results show evidence for the reliability of the VAIAK scores as well as evidence for the validity as a measure of both art interest and art knowledge in (scientific) research, while at the same time also providing important clarification and differentiation between the two dimensions. With this new questionnaire, we offer a tool for researchers in empirical aesthetics, creativity, and also applied fields to quantify one or both of the art interest and art knowledge dimensions.

The authors present a comprehensive review and theoretical discussion of factors that could influence our interaction with museum-based art. Art is an important stimulus that reveals core insights about human behavior and thought. Art perception is in fact often considered one of the few uniquely human phenomena whereby we process multiple types of information, experience myriad emotions, make evaluations, and where these elements not only occur but dynamically combine. Art viewing often occurs in museums, which—in conjunction with “real” artworks—may contribute greatly to experience. However, to date, psychological aesthetics studies have only begun to consider in-museum examinations, focusing instead on highly controlled laboratory-based studies, and leading to calls for a need to shift to ecologically valid examinations. To provide a foundation for such research, the authors consider what key psychological differences may be expected between original/reproduced and museum/lab-based art, and why the art experience may be different when occurring within the museum context. They also review factors that should be controlled for, or which may raise new, unexplored areas for empirical research. These include 3 main levels: the artwork, the viewer, and physical aspects of the museum. The authors connect these factors to a model of art processing and relate to findings from sociology and general museum studies, which have largely been overlooked in psychological aesthetics research.

According to the processing-fluency explanation of aesthetics, more fluently processed stimuli are preferred (R. Reber, N. Schwarz, & P. Winkielman, 2004, Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience? Personality and Social Psychology Review, Vol. 8, pp. 364-382.). In this view, the subjective feeling of ease of processing is considered important, but this has not been directly tested in perceptual processing. In two experiments, we therefore objectively manipulated fluency (ease of processing) with subliminal perceptual priming (Study 1) and variations in presentation durations (Study 2). We assessed the impact of objective fluency on feelings of fluency and liking, as well as their interdependence. In line with the processing-fluency account, we found that objectively more fluent images were indeed judged as more fluent and were also liked more. Moreover, differences in liking were even stronger when data were analyzed according to felt fluency. These findings demonstrate that perceptual fluency is not only explicitly felt, it can also be reported and is an important determinant of liking.

Whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder or shared among individuals is a longstanding question in empirical aesthetics. By decomposing the variance structure of data for facial attractiveness, it has been previously shown that beauty evaluations comprise a similar amount of private and shared taste (Hönekopp, 2006). Employing the same methods, we found that, for abstract artworks, components that vary between individuals and relate to personal taste are particularly strong. Moreover, we instructed half of our participants to disregard their own taste and judge stimuli according to the taste of others instead. Ninety-five women rated 100 abstract artworks for liking and 100 faces for attractiveness. We found that the private taste proportion was much higher in abstract artworks, accounting for 75% of taste compared to 40% in the face condition. Abstract artworks were also less affected than faces by the instruction to rate according to others’ taste and therefore less susceptible to incorporation of external beauty standards. Together, our findings support the notion that art—and especially abstract art—crystallizes private taste.