The impact of contextual information on aesthetic engagement of artworks

alarm generation

Stimuli for Experiment 2 included 16 images of representative artwork by various Indian and European/American artists (see Supplementary Materials for details on each artwork). Images not protected by copyright restrictions are available on our OSF project page. The image set of 16 artworks was drawn from a larger set of 36 artworks that our lab used in a previous study.¹⁰. The collection of 36 artworks was selected based on ratings for movement, balance, saturation, warmth, depth, and complexity on a Likert scale from 1 (low) to 7 (high). We divided these 36 artworks into four balanced groups (we used a random simulation method similar to Experiment 1). Thus the four subsets included 9 artworks balanced on the ratings of Movement, Balance, Saturation, Warmth, Depth, and Complexity. We also selected 4 artworks from each subset which included 2 artworks from India and 2 artworks by European/American artists across a variety of art styles and content. Thus, the four balanced subsets of artworks (4 artworks per subset, 2 Indian, and 2 European/American) finally used for the current experiment did not differ significantly in average ratings of movement, balance, saturation, warmth, depth, and complexity (see Table 3). Artwork from Subset 1 was not preceded by any contextual information. Each artwork from subset 2, 3, and 4 is preceded with information about the content, artist, and technique respectively (see Tasks and Procedure below for more details).