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Greater cross-viewer similarity of semantic associations for representational than for abstract artworks

Schepman, Astrid
; 
Rodway, Paul
; 
Pullen, Sarah J.
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Affiliation
Department of Psychology, University of Chester
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Publication Date
2015-10-22
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Psychology
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Abstract
It has been shown previously that liking and valence of associations in response to artworks show greater convergence across viewers for representational than for abstract artwork. The current research explored whether the same applies to the semantic content of the associations. We used data gained with an adapted Unique Corporate Association Valence (UCAV) measure, which invited 24 participants to give short verbal responses to 11 abstract and 11 representational artworks. We paired the responses randomly to responses given to the same artwork, and computed semantic similarity scores using UMBC Ebiquity software. This showed significantly greater semantic similarity scores for representational than abstract art. A control analysis, in which responses were randomly paired with responses from the same category (abstract, representational) showed no significant results, ruling out a baseline effect. For both abstract and representational artworks, randomly paired responses resembled each other less than responses from the same artworks, but the effect was much larger for representational artworks. Our work shows that individuals share semantic associations in response to artworks with other viewers to a greater extent when the artwork is representational than abstract. Our novel method shows potential utility for many areas of psychology that aim to understand the semantic convergence of people’s verbal responses, not least aesthetic psychology.
Citation
Schepman, A., Rodway, P., & Pullen, S. J. (2015). Greater cross-viewer similarity of semantic associations for representational than for abstract artworks. Journal of Vision, 15(14):12, 1–6, doi:10.1167/15.14.12.
Publisher
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
Journal
Journal of Vision
Research Unit
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10034/581815
DOI
10.1167/15.14.12
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PubMed Central ID
Type
Article
Language
en_US
Description
Journal article. Available as gold open access via the URL given.
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ISSN
1534-7362
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University of Chester internal grant partly funded work towards this article.
Additional Links
http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2466597