A new conception of visual aesthetic sensitivity

Abstract

Aesthetic sensitivity has been defined as the ability to recognize and appreciate beauty and compositional excellence, and to judge artistic merit according to standards of aesthetic value. The Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test (VAST) has often been used to assess this ability, but recent research has revealed it has several psychometric problems. Such problems are not easily remedied, because they reflect flawed assumptions inherent to the concept of aesthetic sensitivity as traditionally understood, and to the VAST itself. We introduce a new conception of aesthetic sensitivity defined as the extent to which someone's aesthetic valuation is influenced by a given feature. Experiment 1 aimed to characterize aesthetic sensitivity to four prominent features in visual aesthetics: complexity, symmetry, contour, and balance. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the findings of Experiment 1 and to assess the test-retest reliability of an instrument designed to measure aesthetic sensitivity to these features using an abridged set of stimuli. Our results reveal that people differ remarkably in the extent to which visual features influence their liking, highlighting the crucial role of individual variation when modelling aesthetic preferences. We did not find clear relations between the four measures of aesthetic sensitivity and personality, intelligence, and art interest and knowledge. Finally, our measurement instrument exhibited an adequate-to-good test-retest reliability.

Commentary on Corradi et al.’s (2019) new conception of aesthetic sensitivity: Is the ability conception dead?

“…Corradi et al () propose that the current conception of aesthetic sensitivity – as the ability to identify aesthetic quality in conformity with external standards (e.g., expert consensus) – needs replacement into a new conception: Aesthetic sensitivity should be redefined as the extent to which certain features of a stimulus are used to form a subjective aesthetic judgment. Although their proposed approach has merits, their (unnecessary) comparison is biased in several ways.…”

Visualizing Aesthetics Across Two Centuries

“…Others have noted that certain theoretical ideas that combine earlier intuitions about taste, with novel interests in objective factors relating to aesthetic appreciation and artistic ability such as Burt and Eysenck's notion of aesthetic sensitivity, start to take off after 1920 (Che, Sun, Gallardo, & Nadal, 2018;Corradi, Chuquichambi, Barrada, Clemente, & Nadal, 2019).…”

Using Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Measures in Museum Studies

“…Most frequently, visual aesthetic sensitivity tests operationalize Child's (1964) definition using "controlled alteration" (Meier, 1928, p. 188), a procedure which consists of deteriorating or creating an altered version of an aesthetic stimulus, and in presenting examinees with the altered and original stimuli, with the task of recognizing which is of better aesthetic quality. The construct validity of tests based on it are however controversial (Gear, 1986;Liu, 1990;Corradi et al, 2019), as it was notably argued that absolute aesthetic standards cannot exist, dismissing any operationalization of Child's definition. Nevertheless, the availability of absolute standards is not a necessary condition for the operationalization of Child's definition (Myszkowski et al, 2020): Aesthetic sensitivity tests rely instead on empirical standards, obtained through expert and/or laypeople consensus.…”

“…Another sign of construct validity can be found in the concurrent validity of visual aesthetic sensitivity tests. This point is also quite controversial (Corradi et al, 2019;Myszkowski et al, 2020), but this is mainly because the nomological network of visual aesthetic sensitivity is yet to be clearly defined. Notably, Eysenck introduced confusion by originally discussing the construct as intelligence in the aesthetic domain (1940) to then speculate that the construct should be independent from intelligence (Frois and Eysenck, 1995)-which is contradicted in a recent meta-analysis (Myszkowski et al, 2018), which showed across 23 studies that its correlation with intelligence is significant and around 0.30.…”