Science and technology UK (Commonwealth Union) – The rising inflation with the rapid printing of money has prompted many investors to explore a diverse range of investment options such as real estate, corporate shares, gold and art. Investment in art has long been considered an option for the super-rich, with a true appreciation for art. In recent years however, ordinary individuals who appreciate art have had new options for investing in art with smaller funds, such as art shares, opening up new options for lovers to show their appreciation.
Researchers at the University College London (UCL) have given art lovers another reason to truly appreciate art in a study that has found that the level of a persons liking of an artwork may affect their memory of when they 1st engaged with it, and the direction they were facing.
The study indicates that aesthetic experience is not simply restricted to the visual aspects of an artwork, but also the moment that it was seen.
The findings, published in PNAS, queried 124 individuals to participate in a virtual reality art gallery, that had 48 chosen abstract artworks by globally recognized digital artists, such as Sara Ludy and Yoshi Sodeoka.
The participants moved through the on-screen gallery with arrow keys on a computer keyboard, with a computer game, indicating that they had to deliberately take action to turn to glance at each picture.
Following the visitation to the gallery researchers instructed the participants to carry out 3 tasks that involved focusing on recognition, spatial memory, and liking.
The 1st, participants looked at several artworks and stated that if they had just viewed them in the gallery or not.
The study was then continued by instructing the participants to place artworks on a museum map, and to reveal in which room, and on which wall the picture was viewed, to test their spatial memory.
The Final steps were conducted with, participants being instructed to rate how much they preferred each piece of artwork, by applying a sliding scale.
The researchers discovered that with increased participant appreciation of a piece of artwork, the greater the chance they remembered the wall of the gallery they had viewed it on.
Dr Mariana Babo-Rebelo who was the lead author from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, explained “Our work suggests a new component in the way people respond to art.”
“The actions that we make as we navigate towards an artwork have been neglected up to now, but our experiments show that the way we turn and orient towards an artwork is associated with our aesthetic response to it, and with the experience we retain after the aesthetic encounter.”
“This suggests an important role for visual first-person perspective in aesthetic experience. First-person perspective could act as a mental glue that binds the artwork itself to the way we subjectively respond to it.”
The researchers put these results to the test with 2 additional studies that saw the involvement of more than 150 further participants. One study had the participants to draw their attention to the abstractness of artworks rather than on the level of appreciation, while the other study carried out the memory test after 24 hours.
Once again, they discovered the same link between whether the viewer liked a piece of artwork and how well it was fixed in their memory to which direction they were facing when they viewed it. This demonstrated that the association between liking and remembering facing direction is not just a result of thinking about liking, and that the association remains in memory.
Professor Patrick Haggard of the UCL Psychology & Language Sciences and a supervisor of the study, says “It’s an old adage that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. But studies in experimental aesthetics still tend either to search for intrinsic properties of art objects that could explain their aesthetic value, or just to describe how individuals differ in their aesthetic responses.”
