Visual Ambiguity Priming Promotes Uniqueness in Art-Viewing Responses.
by
Francesco V. Donato
A Dissertation
in
Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Approved
Dr. Michael Serra Chair of Committee
Dr. Roman Taraban
Dr. Tyler Davis
Dr. Keith Jones
Dr. Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School
December, 2019
Copyright 2019, Francesco V. Donato
Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gratitude is extended to my entire dissertation committee; Roman Taraban, Keith
Jones, Tyler Davis and especially to my committee chair, Michael Serra. Their willingness and availability helped ensure that I finished in a timely manner. I also reflect warmly on the support I received from the close friends I gained during my time in
Texas. These magnanimous people include John Schumacher, Elizabeth Briones, Serena
Mangano, Elizabeth Green, Brittney Neilson, Ethan Dahl, and Sean O’bryan. Two of my oldest friends, Bobby Davidson and John J. Briggs were tirelessly available whenever I needed to vent frustration or share a small accomplishment. These two gentlemen provided constant encouragement and support throughout this endeavor. Finally, I am absolutely certain that this document would never have existed if it was not for the sacrifices of my mother, Concetta Donato; a seventeen-year-old farmgirl from Sicily who would eventually only graduate high school while still struggling with English. After flatlining and being resuscitated during my birth, she dedicated herself simply to making sure I had as many opportunities to grow, learn and express myself as possible. She has proudly spent her life as a seamstress and today, she is treasured not just by me, but also by the entirety of a small community in the Florida panhandle who would likely be walking around in baggy uniforms and poorly fitted prom dresses if it was not for her.
ii Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ...... ii
Abstract ...... iv
List of Tables ...... v
List of Figures ...... vi
1. Introduction ...... 1
1.1 Locating divergent thinking within empirical aesthetics ...... 4
1.2 Incoming visual information in empirical aesthetics ...... 6
1.3 That which hinders creativity...... 8
1.4 That which supports creativity ...... 11
1.4.1 Broad empirical support for shifting perceptual orientation ...... 12
1.4.2 Mechanisms behind the contemplative, perceptual orientation ..13
1.5 Current Study ...... 17
2. Method and Results ...... 21
2.1 Study 1 ...... 21
2.2 Study 2 ...... 29
3. General Discussion ...... 41
References ...... 51
Appendices ...... 69
A. Extended Literature Review ...... 69
B. Assumption testing (study 1) ...... 194
C. Assumption testing (study 2/time on task analysis) ...... 197
D. Assumption testing (study 2/uniqueness analysis) ...... 205
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ABSTRACT
Generally speaking, we navigate most of our daily lives through a mode of visual perception that is externally directed with a bias towards object recognition. This orientation allows for the formation of early predictions within the brain’s visual processing system which leads to a narrowing focus of both semantic-associative processes as well as their resulting potential inferences that we derive from what we encounter visually. This approach is reinforced and cultivated across our lifespans because of its usefulness during our daily lives to help us correctly identify what we are looking at in an automatic and seemingly effortless manner. The problem with this mode of visual perception is that it is counterproductive during an aesthetic experience. Visual art—unlike similar experiences such as entertainment, decoration, or propaganda—is not intended to provide a single, correct interpretation. Nonetheless, most of us unknowingly apply our externally directed attention and its subsequent narrowing associative processes when encountering such aesthetic objects that were initially intended to provide us with the opportunity to explore our more imaginative faculties. Such novice art viewers consistently access only the most literal, superficial interpretations of an artwork’s semantic features—its knowable content—because they lack the experience of actively calling upon their more imaginative faculties when faced with the impenetrable ambiguity of an artwork’s stylistic features. With all this in mind, two studies were conducted using an innovative perceptual intervention capable of artificially shifting a utilitarian perceptual orientation towards a more aesthetically conducive, exploratory approach. The resulting short-lived effect promoted deeper, more imaginative engagements for art viewers across the spectrum of art-specific expertise.
iv Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
LIST OF TABLES
1. Common Nouns & their Most Common Verb Responses & Frequencies ...... 26
2. Descriptive Statistics (MANOVA) ...... 28
3. Univariate Tests of Between-Subject Effects ...... 29
4. Descriptive Statistics (MANCOVA) (in milliseconds) ...... 37
5. Descriptive Statistics for uniqueness and expertise by condition ...... 39
6. Final Model Summary: MLR Analysis...... 39
7. Pearson Correlations: Semantic distance, contemplation, typing time ...... 194
8. Test of Multivariate Normality ...... 196
9. Leven’s Test of Equality of Error Variance ...... 196
10. Test of Univariate normality on Full Data before Transformation ...... 198
11. Test of Univariate Normality, Reduced Data before Transformation ...... 198
12. Test of Univariate Normality, Reduced Data After Transformation ...... 201
13. Test of Univariate Normality, Reduced Data After Transformation ...... 202
14. Box’s Test of Equality of Covariance Matrices ...... 204
15. Levene’s Test of Equality of Error Variances ...... 204
16. Univariate Tests of Between-subject effects on time measures ...... 204
17. Tolerance and VIF Values ...... 205
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LIST OF FIGURES
1. Examples of sharp and blurred images according to the methodology ...... 22
2. Study 1 on-screen instructions ...... 25
3. Study 1 Probing phase sequence ...... 27
4. Study 2 Painting examples ...... 32
5. Aesthetic fluency scale ...... 33
6. Study 2 on-screen instructions ...... 34
7. Study 2 Screen images of the probing phase presentation ...... 35
8. Sharp & Blur condition plots, uniqueness & expertise ...... 40
9. Scatterplot matrices of DVs for participants in the Sharp condition ...... 195
10. Scatterplot matrices of DVs for participants in the Blurry condition ...... 195
11. Histogram of (untransformed) baseline typing test scores ...... 199
12. Histogram of (log transformed) expertise reports ...... 199
13. Histogram of (log transformed) contemplation times ...... 200
14. Histogram of (log transformed) typing times ...... 200
15. Scatterplot matrices of DVs for participants in the Sharp condition ...... 202
16. Scatterplot matrices of DVs for participants in the Blurry condition ...... 203
17. Histogram of residuals ...... 205
18. Plot of the residuals ...... 206
19. Q-Q plot of the distribution of errors ...... 206
20. Scale location plot, assumption of constant error variance...... 207
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
Aesthetic appreciation is said to require some level of detachment from everyday concerns coupled with some degree of overcoming a habitual reliance on easily accessible semantic information (Cupchik et al., 2009; Leder et al., 2004). It is common in empirical aesthetics to finds such behavior in viewers with higher levels of art-specific expertise who actively disregard semantic information from interfering with their experience (Belke et al., 2006; Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988; Cupchik et al., 2009; Winston
& Cupchik, 1992). Doing so is said to allow such viewers to explore farther reaches of their semantic memory in an effort to be more contemplative of an artwork’s more ambiguous, stylistic features (Belke, Leder, & Augustin, 2006; Cupchik & Gebotys,
1988; Cupchik, Vartanian, Crawley, & Mikulis, 2009; Cupchik & Winston, 1996;
Cupchik, Winston, & Herz, 1992; Winston & Cupchik, 1992). People low in art-specific expertise, however, are said to almost exclusively rely on semantic information to retrieve quickly from what they already know concretely in a singular effort to arrive at a definitive conclusion based on the recognizable subject matter of artworks (Augustin &
Leder, 2006; Crilly, Moultrie, & Clarkson, 2004; Cupchik, Shereck, & Spiegel, 1994;
Hekkert, 1995; Hekkert, Snelders, & Wieringen, 2003; Leder, 2001; Leder, Belke,
Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004; Moles, 1958; Nodine, Locher, & Krupinski, 1993; Parsons,
1987; Quispel, Maes, & Schilperoord, 2016).
For our purposes of investigating creativity in the art viewing context, it is useful to consider the act of creativity in terms of the effort to overcome obvious ideas (George,
Mielicki, & Wiley, 2019) and how this effort assists the further effort of trying to
1 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 generate multiple, potential solutions rather than to quickly arrive at one definitive solution (Guilford, 1967; Milbrandt & Milbrandt, 2011; Reiter-Palmon, Mumford,
O'Connor-Boes, & Runco, 1997). Considering the relationship between these efforts and creativity allows us to appreciate how such efforts promotes contemplation rather than comprehension. In fact, these efforts to contemplate represent fundamental aspects of the divergent thinking literature where creative generation tasks are intentionally structured to not offer a definitive, single solution (Dietrich & Kanso, 2010) which, in turn, gives them the capacity to arouse a more contemplative mindset.
Understanding how people perform on divergent thinking tasks requires the mention of another relationship. This being the relationship between creative thinking and semantic memory (Abraham, 2014; Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, &
Benedek, 2014; Kenett, Anaki, & Faust, 2014; Ward, 2008) which helps to ground two of the more prominent theories on creativity. The associative theory of creativity posits that creative ideas arise spontaneously through a series of associative processes (i.e., flexibility, dissociative ability) that allow for farther reaches into semantic memory’s weaker associates (Mednick, 1962; Bowden, Jung-Beeman, Fleck, & Kounios, 2005).
The controlled attention theory expands Mednick’s original work by placing added emphasis on the ability to exert top-down control over stronger, near associates and their salient information which then allows for such a farther, semantic exploration (Beaty &
Silvia, 2012, 2013; Gilhooly et al., 2007; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011). Both theories are situated within the associative framework’s premise that steeper associative gradients lead to a more narrowly focus conceptual attention and a higher likelihood of responding only to the strongest activations of near associates. Conversely, flatter gradients are not
2 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 burdened by the disruption of such strong activations which, in turn, allows a broader conceptual attention to access weaker, more remote associates (Mednick, 1962). Finally, any attempt to artificially enhance the activation of such weaker associates can be understood in terms of accounting for a greater capacity to creatively connect more distal/unrelated concepts in some novel manner (Martindale, 1995).
With this said, performing well in a divergent thinking task appears to involve the two efforts related to creative thinking; overcoming obvious ideas as well as the attempt to generate multiple possible solutions. Divergent thinking tasks such as generating alternative uses for easily associable, everyday objects first brings about a necessity to overcome obvious ideas by way of somehow preventing well-established, salient information from interfering with the additional effort to self-generate novel ideas (Beaty
& Silvia, 2012; Benedek, Franz, Heene, & Neubauer, 2012; Benedek, Jauk, Sommer,
Arendasy, & Neubauer, 2014; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011). Such effort requires interference management; a conscious effort to suppress salient information (Gupta, Jang,
Mednick, & Huber, 2012; Beaty & Silvia, 2012) Said differently; interference management implies a deliberate attempt to avoid a more exploitatory approach to memory retrieval (Arbuthnott & Frank, 2000A; Arbuthnott, & Frank, 2000B; Troyer,
Moscovitch, & Winocur, 1997; Unsworth, Spillers, & Brewer, 2010). And, such an effort to move away from obvious ideas has been shown to change responses from initially mundane to more creative (Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, & Wynn, 2007; Nusbaum &
Silvia, 2011).
Divergent thinking tasks are also commonly accompanied by loosely goal- directed instructions meant to encourage participants to consider the task as open-ended
3 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 by promoting it as having multiple solutions. This allows researchers to observe and record the associative behavior that hopefully reflects a broader conceptual attention.
This type of attention is considered almost a requirement to a more exploratory approach to memory retrieval (Friedman, Fishbach, Förster, & Werth, 2003) as well as resulting in less structured access to weaker, more remote associates becoming applicable, novel alternatives to these open-ended problems (Guilford, 1957; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011;
Wilson, Guilford, & Christensen, 1953).
Inferior performance in divergent thinking tasks appears to reflect a narrower conceptual attention. Such performance comes from a more exploitatory memory retrieval that relies on the strongest activations of near associates to produce more common responses (Beaty & Silvia, 2012; Benedek et al., 2014A; Nusbaum & Silvia,
2011). Superior performance’s more exploratory reaching of farther, weaker associates brings about responses that are quantifiably more original and/or unique (Acar & Runco,
2014; Beaty & Silvia, 2012; Benedek et al., 2014B; Gilhooly et al., 2007; Gupta et al.,
2012). This is why locating response characteristics such as the level of uniqueness allows researchers to quantify divergent thinking in a manner that makes it a well- validated measure of creativity (Beaty, Smeekens, Silvia, Hodges, & Kane, 2013;
Kaufman, Plucker, & Baer, 2008; Torrance, 1988) as well as a robust evaluative tool for assessing the use of our imaginative faculties (Jung, 2014).
1.1 Locating divergent thinking within empirical aesthetics.
It appears that a few curious similarities exist between the divergent thinking literature and aesthetic appreciation. First, the same imaginative faculties said to be captured through divergent thinking performance have recently caught the attention of
4 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 researchers in empirical aesthetics who have come to consider these faculties as being just as crucial to the viewing of art as they are to its production (Eckhoff & Urbach, 2008;
Fenner, 2003; Housen, 2007; Joy & Sherry, 2003; Marković, 2012; Tinio, 2013).
Here, again, consider the purpose of a creative generation task such as the alternative uses test. These open-ended problems are meant to promote the generation of multiple possible solutions rather than one definitive correct response. This intentionality closely resembles that of artists who view their work as “art for art’s sake” (i.e., art divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function, Gautier, 1890) where the artwork provides an opportunity for contemplation because it has no single, correct meaning.
Distinctions in associative behavior between those performing poorly and those performing well during divergent thinking tasks seem to also correspond with the behavioral differences between art viewers with higher and lower levels of art-specific expertise. Recall, again, interference management’s role as a determinant of performance in a divergent thinking task (Gupta et al., 2012; Beaty & Silvia, 2012). A similar attempt to avoid obvious ideas appears to occurs in art viewers with higher levels of art-specific expertise according to findings showing that all art viewers are initially, equally focused on categorizing knowable content during their engagement with an artwork (Augustin &
Leder, 2006; Berlyne & Ogilvie, 1974; 1974) but, only those with higher levels of expertise appear to move towards a more deliberate attempt to engage the artwork’s more ambiguous, stylistic features in a contemplative manner by way of suppressing easily accessible semantic information (Augustin & Leder, 2006; Belke, Leder & Augustin,
2006; Cupchik, 1992).
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These past findings regarding expertise-based behavior during the art-viewing experience seems reminiscent of creativity's required effort of overcoming obvious ideas in an attempt to generate multiple possible solutions. If aspects of the imagination are necessary for aesthetic appreciation (Eckhoff & Urbach, 2008; Marković, 2012; Tinio,
2013) and divergent thinking is the initial generative component of creative thinking
(Campbell, 1960; Ellamil, Dobson, Beeman, & Christoff, 2012; Guilford, 1984) then, it seems there is reasonable cause to merge relevant aspects of the divergent thinking literature’s methodology of assessing creativity into the empirical aesthetics framework regarding creativity in the art-viewing experience. As such, we arrive at the theoretical framework that guides this project. First, the visual art-viewing experience is, here, being posited as a type of engagement that can promote contemplation. Second, that art-specific expertise likely has some beneficial impact on creativity-related proxy measures expressed in one’s response to art. Finally, the measure of uniqueness in responses is a valid, proxy measure for speculating whether someone is responding creatively during an art-viewing experience. Next, we apply these theoretical aspects to the development of a short, user-friendly perceptual intervention with the potential of improving response uniqueness during an art-viewing experience.
1.2 Incoming visual information in empirical aesthetics.
A question worth considering; why do creativity researchers label obvious ideas in seemingly detestable terms that suggest these ideas are nothing more than disruptive liabilities? To begin answering this, we look to the very nature of incoming, visual- sensory information being understood in the cognitive sciences as utterly meaningless patterns of light energy (Fechner, 1876 as cited in Tinio & Smith, 2014; Gregory, 1970,
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1972, 1980, 2005; Helmholtz, 1867; Leder, 2014). As such, the burden is on us to generate meaning that we situationally deem applicable to what we perceptually encounter (Gregory, 1980, 2005; Lupyan, 2015; Trapp & Bar, 2015). A noteworthy consequence of the natural ambiguity of incoming information is that we likely possess a cognitive bias towards semantic information over syntactic information because we are able to quickly resolve the incoming ambiguity that shuttles in semantic information by accompanying its visual processing with an already-developed verbal vocabulary for visual features that we have prior experience with (Gibson, 1971). This is why semantic information is central in our ability to easily denote external objects (Berlyne, 1971;
Cupchik, 1992).
Interestingly, it is the natural ambiguity of incoming visual information that is also often exploited by visual artists to obstruct an audience’s ability to reach an easy, literal interpretation of their work (Conrad, 2016; Bullough, 1914; Hekkert & Van
Wierigen, 1996; Horkheimer, Adorno, & Noeri, 2002; Eco, 1994). Moreover, obstructing one’s ability to reach an easy interpretation is a source of discomfort for inexperienced art viewers who are guided by the lay theory that their job is to comprehend an artwork’s subject matter (Galindo & Rodríguez, 2000; Cohen & Aston-Jones 2005; Daw et al.,
2006). As such, the intentionality behind creating an experience that serves no purpose beyond its own contemplation (i.e., "art for art's sake") seems at odds with these lay theories of wanting to quickly ‘get’ an artwork.
The crucial aspect of this conflict involves the distinctions between semantic and syntactic information. The successful interpretation of semantic information is all that is required to attach a lexical identity to any knowable content depicted in an artwork
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(Saint-Martin, 1990). On the other hand, syntactic information (i.e., the unique brushstrokes of one mid-19th century painter) is considered impenetrably ambiguous because we have yet to establish experiential rules to govern either the encoding or interpretation of this information (Kolers, 1973). As a result, the visual processing of syntactic information becomes an isolated struggle for most viewers because they have not experienced this painter’s brushstrokes regularly. In turn, this means the visual processing of her/his brushstrokes are not bound to previously learned, supplemental verbal processing. Ultimately, those who are struggling are doing so because they cannot label or categorize the visual features of the brushstrokes quickly and in some meaningful manner.
1.3 That which hinders creativity
There exists a small literature regarding experimental attempts to improve creative performance through the manipulation of perception-based situational factors.
This line of research can be summarized as creativity improves in one of two conditions; either through the additive intervention of some perceivable element that helps inhibit some hard-wired, instinctual aspect to respond more automatically (Friedman et al., 2003;
Howard-Jones, & Murray, 2003; Liu, 2016; McCaffrey, 2012; Wegbreit, Suzuki,
Grabowecky, Kounios, & Beeman, 2012) or through some subtractive intervention that removes perceivable elements that would otherwise encourage this same instinctual aspect (Chrysikou, Motyka, Nigro, Yang, & Thompson-Schill, 2016; Chrysikou &
Weisberg, 2005; Jansson & Smith, 1991). Here, we find a common denominator and the reason why creativity researchers consider obvious ideas to be a liability; creative
8 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 thinking requires some form of overcoming a predisposition to receive and process perceptual information in some experience-based, instinctual manner.
Perceptually, we navigate through most of our daily lives with little necessity to be consciously engaged when we encounter common objects or everyday events (e.g., we are not surprised when we wake up and find the coffee maker we bought two years ago still existing in our kitchen nor do we need to stop and figure out how to operate the doorknob that has been on our front door for the last decade). The reason here is that we accumulated experiences with these objects. These past experiences have allowed us to become familiar enough with these objects that we eventually respond to them in an almost unconscious and habitual manner. This level of automaticity involved in how we respond is partially a result of our capacity for object recognition and its heavy reliance on a variety of the cognitive system’s efficiency and automaticity directives. These guiding mechanisms include attention modulations of sensory adaptations such as the sharpening (Li, Miller, & Desimone, 1993) and facilitation models (James & Gauthier,
2006) as well as our ability to exploit acquired inattention when our visual system deems something in our visual field as being irrelevant (Yee, 1999). Of these directives, the most germane to the current project's emphasis on automaticity is our capacity to acquire learned responses (Dobbins, Schnyer, Verfaellie, & Schacter, 2004; Schacter, Dobbins, &
Schnyer, 2004). This is because such responses are especially useful in regard to the natural ambiguity of incoming information.
It is only through our ability to amass a repository of stored knowledge from past experiences that we are able to cultivate a habituated, systematic approach to handling such ambiguity (Archambault, O'Donnell, & Schyns, 1999; Eckstein, Abbey, Pham, &
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Shimozaki, 2004; Goldstone, 1998; Murphy & Honey, 2016). It is this codified knowledge that becomes more influential as we increasingly expedite the encoding of similar features across successive encounters as a means to further accelerate recognition processes. In time, we are increasingly able to identify and categorize what eventually becomes the knowable features in what we see in an almost instantaneous and effortless manner. That which was once ambiguous ultimately becomes obvious.
The benefit here is that the learned formation and highly automated retrieval of such responses gives us the freedom from having to expend more deliberate and time- consuming effort in every individual encounter’s pure sensory information (Dobbins et al., 2004; Horner & Henson, 2008; Schacter et al., 2004). Perceptual learning even allows for the automated retrieval of well-practiced, easily accessible associates to be spliced back into early stages of visual processing as an additional means to narrow down perceptual processing to maximize performance and minimize conscious effort (Witzel,
Olkkonen, & Gegenfurtner, 2016).
Additionally, recognizable semantic information and the ease of accessibility that it enjoys is responsible for more than just being the source content for predictably systematic and habitual responses. Recognizable semantic information is also shown to reinforce this type of response during subsequent encounters. Specifically, exposure to high spatial frequency information (i.e., that which provides the specific details to resolve local visual features) can condition our selective attention to be increasingly receptive towards the processing of local features in subsequent visual tasks (Shulman & Wilson,
1987; Volberg, Kliegl, Hanslmayr, & Greenlee, 2009; Flevaris, Bentin, & Robertson,
2011A). It appears, then, that increasing visual clarity which, allows recognition of
10 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 knowable content to become easier, has a priming effect of further narrowing our visual search to focus more so on easily recognizable content in what we subsequently perceive.
As such, aspects that drive us to instinctually respond also behave in a manner that helps reinforce this instinctual approach. Said differently; our inclination towards, and reliance on, higher levels of visual clarity appears to perpetuate itself.
These details constitute the development of a sort of everyday, visual expertise that allows us to become visual virtuosos before we are even able to walk (Hoffman,
2000). But these details also result in our instinctual manner of responding that hinders creativity. Moving forward, this hindrance will be referenced as a predisposed, utilitarian, perceptual orientation. The reasoning being is that this perceptual approach is driven by mechanism meant to facilitate an exploitatory manner of memory retrieval intended to recognize and ultimately generate meaning for the usefulness of what we see in a consistently reliable manner. This orientation’s major accomplishment is straightforward; it is continually applicable and applied simply because visual perception is our dominant sensory modality for navigating the world around us. Moreover, when taken as a whole, we begin to appreciate why a typical response to something is usually both an obvious and uncreative idea. As such, it is justifiable to view our predisposed perceptual orientation as counterproductive to creativity.
1.4 That which supports creativity
With all these details from past work, it is reasonable to presume that we are likely under the influence of a predisposed, utilitarian orientation throughout most of our daily lives. However, this raises a peculiar question; if so, how, and by what means, do we respond when we encounter objects or events that are novel, that offer no definitive
11 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 labels, or that have no definitive purpose to serve? All of us with normal or corrected-to- normal vision have encountered something like this that required us to take a moment and deliberately figure out what we were looking at (e.g., the discovery of some mysterious, gooey blob under the kitchen sink or an abstract painting in a museum that caught our attention).
For this question, we look to the philosophy of aesthetics, stretching as far back as the ancient Greek origin of the word aesthetics. Over two millennia ago, the term aisthēta was used to signify a more intentional, associative meandering in an object’s natural ambiguity—the pure sensory experience of that object—as a distinct perceptual approach from that of calling upon one’s already learned knowledge to comprehend the object
(Aesthetic, n.d.; Aesthetic, 1989; Baumgarten, 1735/1954; Wessell, 1972). A similar detachment from one's already codified knowledge is said to occur when we avoid searching for personal relevance or some everyday usefulness during an experience. Such avoidance has been said to allow us the openness to explore that experience more imaginatively (Shaftesbury, 1711/1964; Kant, 1790/1987; Schopenhauer 1818/1969).
Moreover, for hundreds of years, philosophers have claimed that engaging our imagination is necessary to reach any level of aesthetic appreciation in anything we might encounter (Kant, 1790/1987; Bullough, 1912; Fry, 1909; Hospers, 1983, 1985). All of this suggests—at least on the philosophical level—that we are also, occasionally, capable of shifting our perceptual orientation towards a more expansive, contemplative approach.
1.4.1 Broad empirical support for the shifting of perceptual orientation.
Luckily, this philosophical line of reasoning has some support from the behavioral sciences as well as specifically from empirical aesthetics. In his treatment of the peak-
12 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 shift experience, Maslow (1968), claimed that engaging an object spontaneously and expressively requires detachment from its purpose & usefulness. Doing so is also argued to require perceptual processes capable of distinguishing an aesthetic experience from an everyday experience (Leder et al., 2004). And, accomplishing such a distinction has been posited to additionally require some degree of suppression of everyday concerns
(Cupchik & Winston, 1996). Neuroimaging research has captured this suppression in participants asked to attend to a painting's mood, color & composition (i.e., being placed in an aesthetic mindset) which led to increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex. This activity was notably absent in others asked to attend to the painting's subject matter (i.e., being placed in a pragmatic mindset) where increased object recognition processing within the right fusiform gyrus was found (Cupchik et al., 2009). More to the point, higher-order, top-down control has, elsewhere, been artificially induced, via transcranial stimulation, over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The results were interpreted as an enhanced aesthetic appreciation presumably by disengaging a pragmatic, habituated mode of identifying objects (Cattaneo et al., 2013). Elsewhere, the left prefrontal cortex has been linked to the more nuanced evaluation of self-generated content—suggesting the involvement of contemplation with one’s internal thoughts. (Burgess, Dumontheil, &
Gilbert, 2007; Christoff, Ream, Geddes, & Gabrieli, 2003; Northoff et al., 2006)
1.4.2 Mechanisms involved in the contemplative, perceptual orientation. Self- generated content is said to be a product of a more internally directed train of thought
(Andrews-Hanna, Smallwood, & Spreng, 2014). With such content comes the importance of isolating the train of thought from being adulterated by the influence of salient information from the environment that would otherwise lead to more exploitatory rather
13 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 than exploratory memory retrieval. Such isolation is referred to as perceptual decoupling and deemed vital for spontaneous, self-generated content because it protects an internally directed attention from being interrupted by incoming information (Smallwood et al.,
2012; Smallwood & Andrews‐Hanna, 2013; Andrews‐Hanna et al., 2014). Without such disruptive interference, memory retrieval is said to be less automatic and reactionary & more spontaneously imaginary (Smallwood et al., 2012). Perceptual decoupling, then, is a useful detail to keep in mind in the context of developing a perceptual intervention capable of suppressing the predisposed utilitarian orientation as a means to bring about a degree of detachment from everyday concerns as well as alleviating the burden of being habitually reliant on easily accessible semantic information. Specifically, perceptual decoupling appears capable of facilitating the conditions necessary for aesthetic appreciation.
But, at the same time, the design of such an intervention must still allow for some general, global receptivity to the ambiguity of pure sensory information in order for there to still be some degree of perceptual experience with, and responsiveness to an external object (i.e., the intervention must still allow for visual detection and visual vigilance). We see this dynamic demonstrated exactly under circumstances where the cognitive system applies highly synchronized alpha-band activity across the visual cortex. The result of this activity is the suppressing of more detail-orientated, visual processing of local features while still allowing visual detection & visual vigilance of more global features to take place (Benedek, Bergner, Könen, Fink, & Neubauer, 2011; Fink & Benedek, 2013;
Benedek, Schickel, Jauk, Fink, & Neubauer, 2014). The consequences of such suppressing alpha activity across the visual cortex have already been linked in creativity-
14 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 related, internally directed tasks including creative idea generation (Fink, Graif, &
Neubauer, 2009; Jauk, Benedek, & Neubauer, 2012; Martindale & Hasenfus, 1978), the solving of ill-defined problems (Jausovec, 1997), and reaching insight during unknowable problems (Kounios & Beeman, 2014). This same suppressing alpha activity is also said to facilitate the reaching of farther, more remote, semantic associates (Fink,
Benedek, Grabner, Staudt, & Neubauer, 2007; Klimesch, Fellinger, & Freunberger, 2011) while its absence is linked to faster retrieval of semantic details in the service of object recognition (Klimesch et al., 2011).
Perceptual interventions capable of artificially inducing synchronized alpha activity across the visual cortex—similar to that which occurs naturally with closed eyes—have also been shown to have an enduring after-effect. Lehtonen and Lehtinen
(1972) employed a Ganzfeld apparatus (a diffused, opaque dome that obscures visual clarity and prevents ocular fixation) to induce this increased alpha activity. The activity initially became elevated after a short delay (M = 24 sec.) during participants' first trial inside the dome. Interestingly, a substantial decline in this delayed onset became apparent after only the 3rd time of being placed in the dome (M = 11 sec.). The reduction of this onset delay implies some degree of acclimating to a visual field that only offers impenetrable ambiguity (i.e., a perceptual shifting towards becoming more receptive to accumulating evidence in a more spontaneous fashion). Elsewhere, stimuli made of only low spatial frequency information (i.e., blurred imagery lacking the visual clarity to resolve knowable objects) has been shown to facilitate a subsequent attentional shift away from local feature processing and towards global feature processing in subsequent
15 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 probing stimuli that immediately follow the priming stimuli (Flevaris, Bentin &
Robertson, 2011A; 2011B).
What we find then is that reducing visual clarity negatively impacts visual processes related to categorization while having no impact on processes related to visual detection and visual vigilance (Coubard et al., 2011; Lehtonen & Lehtinen, 1972) and does so in some relation to the suppressive nature of alpha activity in the visual cortex.
And, all of this appears to either have a similar effect as perceptual decoupling or somehow related to perceptual decoupling.
There is a threshold level of visual clarity, specifically ~8 cycles per image, (cpi) where a depiction of easily accessible semantic information below this threshold loses its capacity to be identifiable (Costen, Parker, & Craw, 1994, 1996; Collishaw & Hole,
2000; Parker & Costen, 1999) due to the remaining information being too coarse even for generalities to be recognized (Collishaw & Hole, 2000). But, at the same time, having to struggle with this amount of unfamiliarity causes us to be more broadly receptive to global features (Shulman, Sullivan, Gish, & Sakoda, 1986; Shulman & Wilson, 1987;
Hekkert, 1995; Robertson, 1996) in a manner believed to be more exploratory than how we approach local features (Oliva & Torralba, 2006). The claim that we take a more exploratory approach to global features is reinforced by research showing reduced visual clarity activating brain regions associated with creativity (Jung et al., 2010; Jung et al.,
2013), more imaginative thinking (Smallwood et al., 2016), spontaneous, self-generated content (Blakemore, Rees, & Frith, 1998; Passingham, Bengtsson, & Lau, 2010), and most importantly to the current project, the free exploration of a virtual environment
(Maguire, Frith, Burgess, Donnett, & O'keefe, 1998).
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These findings help point to how we respond when we encounter ill-defined, opened-ended and otherwise unknowable problems such as art intended for art’s sake that has no purpose other than to be an object of contemplation (Horkheimer, Adorno, &
Noeri, 2002). These findings also help reinforce the notion that we can remain receptive in an exploratory fashion to the pure sensory input of syntactic information while detached from the adulterating influence of responding more automatically to the knowable and easily accessible content of semantic information.
As such, it seems reasonable to test reduced visual clarity as a potential, perceptual intervention capable of suppressing critical aspects of our predisposed utilitarian orientation which, in turn, can subsequently bring about a more contemplative perceptual orientation and potentially even do so in a temporarily enduring fashion. As presented above, a diverse series of relationships across various literatures have helped to support this claim. However, it seems there are no previous attempts to investigate the crossroad where these findings meet. This project represents that initial, exploratory attempt in the realm of aesthetic appreciation.
1.5 Current Study
The current project administers the proposed reduced visual clarity perceptual intervention in the form of a short video presented in a VR headset. The video’s visual clarity is the manipulation with either a sharp or blurred version being presented to either a control or experimental group. The first study is an initial attempt to locate any creativity-relevant impact of the project’s manipulation in the more constrained context of generating simple word to word association in a goal-directed task. It is well accepted that associative processes function within semantic memory and that semantic memory
17 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 has a central role in both the associative and controlled attention theories on creativity
(see Beaty et al., 2014 for a more extensive review).
Study 1’s rationale stems from appreciating the role semantic memory has in creativity as well as from the notion that any given target word such as a single noun can be classified in terms of the extent to which it intrinsically imposes constraints on any given one-verb response (Barch et al., 2000). These constraints are noticeable in the higher frequencies of the most common one verb responses to only a single noun target
(Prabhakaran, Adam, & Green, 2014). Being less confined—semantically—by these constraints such as being explicitly asked to be creative when responding is shown to result in the generation of slightly more unique verb responses (Prabhakaran, Adam, &
Green, 2014). If the reduced visual clarity can improve creative performance under such limiting conditions, it would suggest that the intervention is influential in impacting associative behavior, given how specifically goal-directed the verb generation task is.
The reasoning here is that the constraints of the task likely carry over to the resulting associative behavior because the single noun presentation and single verb response likely limit the range of any possible associative exploration.
To semantically quantify such differences in associative behaviors researchers have begun to use latent semantic analysis (LSA) (Dumas & Dunbar, 2014; Forster &
Dunbar, 2009; Harbinson & Haarman, 2014; Hass, 2017). LSA is a statistical technique for quantifying the latent semantic relationships between words through an analysis of a large corpus of text (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998). The
LSA platform accomplishes this through its inferencing word relatedness by representing the frequencies of word co-occurrences in a multi-dimensional semantic space. The use
18 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 of LSA in creativity related research is grounded in the rationale that semantic distance is central to creativity in that pure semantic distance is a fundamental aspect to consider when attempting to assess where a response—in relation to other responses—sits on a spectrum between common and unique.
While this approach has been shown to be well validated in the setting of locating the semantic distance between individual words (Prabhakaran, Adam & Green, 2014) it has also resulted in mixed results when attempting to apply similar LSA analyses to longer phrase and sentence length responses (Bossomaier, Harré, Knittel, & Snyder,
2009). For this reason, the use of LSA is appropriate for study 1, while study 2 uses independent raters to assess the uniqueness of sentence-length responses.
In study 2, the same intervention is applied directly to the project’s central thesis of attempting to improve the creativity proxy marker of uniqueness in an art viewing context. In doing so, the second study represents a more open-ended, less goal-directed environment to test the intervention. After the intervention, participants across a spectrum of art-specific expertise will respond simply with what comes to mind when viewing a painting. If levels of uniqueness in responses correlate with art-specific expertise, then there would be support for the claim that those having more art-specific knowledge are also more likely to generate more unique responses during an art-viewing experiences.
Most importantly, finding increased level of uniqueness in the experimental condition would align with past work claiming that increased creativity markers signifies greater accessing of more remote associates by way of a broader conceptual attention. If we interpret such findings through the established rationale that aesthetic appreciation requires detachment from everyday concerns and a suppression of being heavily reliant
19 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 on semantic information (Cupchik et al., 2009; Leder et al., 2004) then, such results would suggest that those in the experimental condition demonstrated themselves to be more aesthetically engaged and imaginatively responsive to the artworks.
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CHAPTER 2 METHOD 2.1 Study 1
Participants and design
Sixty-four participants were recruited through Texas Tech University's research recruitment website (SONA) as well as with the university’s internal announcement system. The only incentive was a 1/60 chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card for those recruited from the announcement system. The self-reported denial of having normal or corrected to normal vision was the only exclusionary criteria. One participant was removed due to interruptions during the experiment. The remaining 63 participants were randomly placed into one of two between-subjects, adaptor phase. This phase constituted the administering of the independent variable across two visual clarity conditions (sharp, blur). Age and gender between these two conditions appeared well balanced; sharp (69% female; Median age = 19) and blur (65% female; Median age = 20). Participants' responses during a probing phase that immediately followed the adaptor phase provided the dependent variables. These outcome measures included contemplation and typing time to explore possible relationships between viewing condition and engagement time as well as an LSA-derived semantic distance value for each response to determine creativity-related conditional differences.
Materials
Adaptor phase. All participants were shown 5 minutes of continuous video content in a VR headset. The video depicted the ordinary, everyday events of people walking past the camera at a weekend farmers market located in an urban environment.
The footage was captured using a 360° camera (GoPro Fusion, San Mateo, CA) placed in
21 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 the middle of this open, public space while under relatively clear skies and mid-morning lighting. The design of such 360° cameras is to capture video from every direction around the device that houses multiple independent cameras. The resulting stitching of the footage from these separate cameras produces an immersive effect when viewed with a
VR headset (Sony Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) while still maintaining the highest degree of uniformity in its presentation both within and across adaptor conditions. In the sharp condition, the original, unaltered video clip, was presented while the blur condition had its visual clarity manipulated using Adobe Premiere Pro with the Skybox plug-in (Adobe
Systems, San Jose, CA: Mettle Inc., Montreal, Canada). The sole difference, here, was the application of a Gaussian blur filter with a 45.76-pixel radius yielding a spatial frequency filtering down to ~6-cpi for the video on the headset’s 1920-pixel display while at a viewing distance of ~1 inch and a visual angle 100°. See figure 1. for specific examples of imagery filtered down to 6 cycles/image.
A B
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C D
E F
Figure 1. (a,b,c,d,e,f) 512 x 384 pixel images at 72ppi. Applying a Gaussian blur of 12.2 pixel radius results in a 6 cpi version (b,d,f).
Probing Phase. Possible associative behavior effects resulting from differences in the two conditions were assumed to show in responses recorded during a probing phase that immediately followed the adaptor phase. Here, the Inquisit software platform
(Millisecond Software, Seattle, WA) was used to administer a verb generation task previously shown to capture differences in creativity output between those explicitly asked to be creative and those who were not (Prabhakaran, Adam, & Green, 2014). Study
1 used this task to present a series of ten common nouns one at a time. All participants were explicitly asked to generate a creative one-verb response to each. See Table 1. for the list of ten nouns and their already established, most common verb response frequencies.
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Latent Semantic Analysis. The measure of semantic distance in one-word responses with the use of LSA is a reliable means to quantify the level of uniqueness regarding such responses (Forster & Dunbar, 2009; Prabhakaran, Adam, & Green, 2014).
Furthermore, LSA’s ability to reliably quantify the semantic similarity between individual words is said to have been thoroughly tested (Harbinson & Haarman, 2014) and demonstrates itself to be predictive of human judgment of similarity in the specific context of quantifying semantic distance between an object and a one-word response of its use to assess creativity (Forster & Dunbar, 2009).
Resulting verb responses from the probing phase were analyzed using LSA’s term-to-term analysis function to compute the semantic distance outcome measure. In this function, the common noun that participants respond to serves as the target by which to assess their verb response’s semantic similarity. LSA generates this measure from the cosine of the angle between vectors corresponding to the two inputted words within the broader consideration of their co-occurrence probability in a larger corpus of text. Each verb response receives a semantic coefficient ranging from -1 to 1 with higher values being more semantically similar. Said differently, these coefficients represent a verb response’s semantic similarity value to the probe noun that motivated it. The inverse (1 minus the coefficient) results in a range of values from 0-2 with higher values representing farther semantic distances from the noun. It is this inverse of the coefficients that provides study 1’s creativity proxy measure; the semantic distance values of each one-verb response.
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Procedures
All sessions were conducted in-person. Participants began by first acknowledging their age and vision along with responding to standard demographic questions. After providing consent, each participant was given spoken instructions regarding the adaptor phase. They were asked to maintain an upright sitting posture and to keep their eyes open and explore the VR environment for the full duration of the 5-minute video. They were also given on-screen, written instructions for the probing phases while an experimenter reviewed these instructions with them. See figure 2 for these instructions. Afterward, participants attempted three practice items. Once completed, participants were fitted with the VR headset and confirmed that they felt comfortable. At this time the experimenter pressed play on the video.
• In the following screens, you will be shown a series of nouns. These words will be presented in the center of the screen one at a time.
• It is your job to think creatively and generate a one verb response to each noun.
Please note:
• by its definition, a verb indicates an action being carried out by the noun being presented.
• The noun will remain on screen until you are prepared to respond. When you are ready, simply click anywhere on the screen to advance to the next screen where you will again see the same noun while also provided with a text entry box to type in your one verb response. Once you finished your response, click “Next” to move on to the next item.
• Click the check box below to acknowledge that you have read these instructions carefully and are prepared to begin.
Figure 2. Study 1 on-screen instructions.
Participants immediately began the probing phase’s verb generation task after the video, when they removed the VR headset and clicked next. Trials began with the
25 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 probing stimuli screen showing one of the ten common nouns at the center of the screen in front of an 18% grey background. The presentation of all ten nouns was randomized.
Participants were explicitly asked to think creatively in responding to the displayed noun with a one verb response. There were no time constraints during the entire probing phase.
Participants were able to click anywhere onscreen to advance from the initial stimuli screen to the task screen. On the task screen, the same noun was shown with an additional text entry box below it. Task screens also included a reiteration of the instructions to
“Think creatively and come up with a one-verb response to this noun.”
Table 1.
Common nouns and their Most Common Verb Responses & Frequencies (Prabhakaran, Adam & Green (2014) Noun Most Common Verb responses & Frequency Office Work .606 Drug Take .592 Soap Wash .592 Candle Light .577 Tree Climb .563 Belt Wear .535 Blade Cut .521 Baby Cry .507 Tool Use .479 Rose Smell .465
During the probing phase, two time on task measures were included to explore any possible relationship between viewing condition and engagement time. The first was between the onset of the noun’s initial presentation and the clicking into the text box.
This latency was considered to capture the contemplation time for participants before their attempts to actively respond. The second time measure came after they clicked into the response entry box and captures the actual typing time between the first and last
26 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 keystrokes within the entry box. After responding, participants clicked forward to progress to the next common noun probing stimuli’s presentation and its subsequent task screen. After completion of all ten items, participants were quickly debriefed, thanked for their time and excused. See figure 3 for Study 1’s probing phase sequence.
Figure 3. Study 1 Probing phase sequence.
Results
Data Handling. The analysis began with the spellchecking of all 630 responses.
Screening included the exclusion of non-verbs (16 responses) and non-coherent words (3 responses). The remaining 611 responses were analyzed through LSA to generate a semantic distance value for each.
Analysis. Table 2 shows the means and standard deviations of the three outcome measures across both viewing conditions. A multivariate analysis of variance
(MANOVA) was conducted to determine whether viewing condition (sharp, blur) had an
27 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 effect on any of three continuous outcome measures (semantic distance, contemplation time, typing time). LSA-derived, semantic distance values measured the remoteness of associates generated as a quantifiable proxy of creativity while both time measures were used as indicators of potential engagement time differences between conditions. Before conducting the MANOVA, tests were run to check for violations of statistical assumptions. The more conservative Pillai’s Trace was calculated for its robustness to any possible departures from normality. Please see Appendix A for a discussion on assumption testing as well as related graphs and tables for study 1.
A non-significant MANOVA effect was found, Pillai’s Trace = .06, F(1, 61) =
1.21, p = .32, ηp2 =.06. This multivariate effect size implies that only 6% of the variance in a canonically derived dependent variable was accounted for by condition. For the sake of completeness, univariate main effects were further analyzed even though such tests would not usually be warranted after a non-significant omnibus test. These non- significant univariate main effects are reported in Table 3.
Table 2 Descriptive Statistics Variable M SD Semantic Distance
Sharp 0.82 0.1 Blur 0.82 0.08 Contemplation Time
Sharp 9139.87 3577.25 Blur 8417.63 5185.73 Typing Time
Sharp 3326.97 1757.07 Blur 2582.23 1326.12
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Table 3 Univariate Tests of Between-Subject Effects Variable F p-value ηp2 Semantic Distance <.001 0.98 <.001 Contemplation Time 0.42 0.52 0.01 Typing Time 3.59 0.06 0.06 Note. df1 = 1 and df2 = 61 for all variables.
Discussion
Study 1 was an attempt to assess whether the reduced visual clarity manipulation could impact the levels of more restricted associative behavior that is likely to accompany word to word associations. Study 1 failed to find any meaningful relationship between the manipulation and either engagement times or the LSA-derived semantic distance values with these values being almost identical for both sharp and blur conditions. The almost identical semantic distance values of both conditions also appears to suggest that the more focused context of a goal-directed task where everyone was given explicit instructions to be creative may have resulted in a ceiling effect likely due to the constraints of the task not providing enough complexity in the stimuli to encourage quantifiable differences in associative behavior. These findings are addressed further in the conclusions as they serve a useful insight into some of creativity’s remaining idiosyncrasies.
2.2 Study 2
Study 2 directly investigated the project’s central thesis by testing the project’s perceptual intervention in the specific context of aesthetic appreciation. Here, the reduced visual clarity manipulation was accompanied with a more open-ended, associative task of
29 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 responding to visual art. The goal was to determine if reduced visual clarity could subsequently impact levels of uniqueness in 1-2 sentence responses to paintings.
Specifically, the underlining rationale points to more common responses in this context likely reflecting a narrower conceptual attention engaging primarily with the more easily accessible, near associates from the paintings' semantic content to arrive at an understanding of their subject matter. On the other hand, locating more unique responses would be suggestive of a broader conceptual attention's farther reach into more remote associates. As such, more unique responses suggest a more contemplative perceptual approach that is believed to be typical in the art viewing experiences of those with higher levels of art-specific expertise.
Participants and design
Study 2 recruited 128 new participants through the university’s research recruitment website (SONA) as well as its internal, online announcement system with the same Amazon gift card incentive. Additionally, the online announcement recruitment reached out specifically to people within the art department as a means to collect data from a more diverse sample of people with various levels of art-specific expertise. It was assumed that most participants coming from the research pool would likely be psychology undergraduates with similarly lower levels of art-specific expertise.
Participants were, again, required to be at least 18 years of age. The same vision exclusionary criteria from study 1 was also in place. One participant was removed due to external interruptions during the experiment. The independent variable was administered through the random placement of the remaining 127 participants into one of two between-subjects, adaptor phase, visual clarity conditions (sharp, blur). Age and gender
30 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 between these two adaptor phase conditions included sharp (57% female; Median age =
19) and blur (47% female; Median age = 19). Participants were tasked to respond to paintings with 1-2 typed sentences during a probing phase that immediately followed the adaptor phase. Data recorded during the probing phase provided the dependent variables.
These outcome measures again included contemplation and typing time to explore any possible relationship that engagement time may have with viewing conditions. A uniqueness score was also generated for each response to determine if viewing condition had some impact on this creativity-related marker. The time on task analysis applied both a baseline typing measure and expertise score as covariates while the uniqueness analysis regressed the uniqueness scores of responses on to both condition and expertise.
Materials
Baseline Typing assessment and adaptor phase. After providing consent, each participant transcribed a short paragraph taken from the opening chapter of Moby Dick.
The paragraph was presented as an on-screen .jpg image while they typed in order to prevent copying and pasting. The adaptor phase was identical to study 1. All participants were randomly assigned to either the control (sharp) or experimental (blur) condition in which they were presented to each condition's respective VR video.
Probing Phase. Just as in study 1, this phase was also conducted through the
Inquisit software platform (Millisecond Software, Seattle, WA). The probing stimuli in the second study consisted of ten examples of representational painting sourced from
Pihko et al., (2011). See figure 4 for examples. Each painting was presented individually at full-screen resolution (1920x1080 pixels) at a viewing distance of ~40 inches with a visual angle of ~37°.
31 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
Figure 4. Painting examples from Pihko et al., (2011)
Aesthetic Fluency Scale. Each participant’s level of art-specific expertise was assessed using the aesthetic fluency scale (Smith & Smith, 2006). This scale assesses one’s experience-derived art-specific knowledge. Evidence for the scale's validity has been demonstrated in how it correlates strongly with openness to experience (Silvia,
2007) which, itself correlates strongly with aesthetic interest, unconventional thinking, and creativity (McCrae, 2007). The development of art-specific knowledge is said to be similar to that of learning a vocabulary where people can be completely unaware, vaguely familiar or fairly confident in their understanding of something (Smith & Smith, 2006).
With this structure, the scale assesses people’s knowledge of ten items regarding specific ideas or artists from art history using a response scale from zero (I have never heard of this term or artist) to 4 (I can talk intelligently about this term or artist). See figure 5 for a reproduction of the scale. This follow-up assessment provided a continuous measure of
32 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 art-specific expertise and was completed at the end of the study to ensure that completing this survey had no impact on probing phase responses.
Please tell us how much you know about the following artists 0 1 2 3 4 and art ideas: Mary Cassatt Please use the following scale: Isamu Noguchi 0. I have never heard of this artist or term John Singer Sargent 1. I have heard of this but don’t really know anything about it Alessandro Botticelli 2. I have a vague idea of what this is Gian Lorenzo Bernini 3. I understand this artist or idea when it is discussed Fauvism
4. I can talk intelligently about this artist or idea in Egyptian Funerary art Stelae Impressionism Chinese Scrolls Abstract Expressionism Figure 5. Aesthetic fluency scale (Smith & Smith, 2006)
Independent raters. The measure of semantic distance in one-word responses through LSA is a reliable means to quantify the level of uniqueness regarding such responses (Forster & Dunbar, 2009; Prabhakaran, Adam, & Green, 2014). Nonetheless, the literature suggests mixed results when attempting to do the same with phrases and sentences (Bossomaier, Harré, Knittel, & Snyder, 2009). It has been shown that LSA results no longer converge with those of human raters when it attempts to assess phrases and sentences (Harbinson & Haarman, 2014). Because of this, study 2 employed independent, expert raters with specific expertise in visual art to assess the uniqueness of participant sentence responses. These raters were asked to apply a 7-point Likert scale between "most common" and "most unique" to each response with the specific instructions to consider each response's uniqueness in the broader context of all 127 33 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 responses provided for each given painting. They were told to pay attention to the frequency of distinct themes found across all responses to that one painting and to use that consideration to inform their judgment as to how common or unique any given response was within that sample. Additional details regarding the use of these raters can be found in both the data handling section under uniqueness analysis.
Procedures
Again, study 2 was conducted in person with the same initial steps as laid out in study 1. See figure 6 for study 2’s on-screen instructions. Study 2 did include the addition of a baseline typing assessment before administering the same adaptor phase as in study
1. Afterward, participants followed the same procedural trajectory as in study 1with a probing phase immediately following the adaptor phase.
Figure 6. Study 2 on-screen instructions.
Again, no timing constraints were placed on the probing phase to allow for the time-on-task measurement. Paintings were initially presented one at a time in full-screen
34 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 view. Participants clicked to move forward to the task screen when they felt ready to respond. The task screen appeared with a smaller version (75%) of the current task painting. See figure 6. for screen images of the probing phase presentation. The task screen also reiterates the instructions with the task prompt; “Using only 1-2 complete sentences, write what comes to mind when looking at this painting.” Directly below the prompt was the response text entry box. Response space of the text box was limited to
150-characters (generally 25 words) to motivate succinct responses. After completion, the participant clicked next to advance to the next painting. The visual clarity of the paintings was sharp and clear for both conditions. Study 2 also captured the same two time- measures; contemplation and typing time through the same procedures as study 1. All participants ended the study by completing the aesthetic fluency scale (Smith & Smith,
2006). Afterward, they were quickly debriefed, thanked, and excused.
Figure 7. Two screen images of the probing phase presentation (stimuli screen & task screen).
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Figure 7.1 Continued. Two screen images of the probing phase presentation (stimuli screen & task screen).
Results Time on Task Analysis
Table 4 shows the back-transformed means and confidence intervals for both time measures across conditions. A MANCOVA was conducted to determine whether there were significant differences between the conditions (sharp, blur) on both contemplation and typing time while controlling for expertise and baseline typing covariates. Before the analysis, several tests were run to check for violations of statistical assumptions. In doing so, it was discovered that the distributions for expertise and both time measures were positively skewed. To correct for this skewness, the time-on-task analysis was performed using the log transformation of these variables. Furthermore, to meet all assumptions, one participant was deemed to be a multivariate outlier and removed from the time on task analysis. See Appendix B for more information on procedures, as well as graphs and tables related to assumption testing. 36 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
A non-significant MANCOVA effect was found, Pillai’s Trace = .99, F(1, 121) =
0.49, p = .61, ηp2 =.008. The effect size, here, indicates that less than 1% of the variance in a canonically derived dependent variable was accounted for by viewing condition after controlling for the covariates. For the sake of completeness, serial univariate tests of between-subject effects were also conducted. These additional, non-significant results are reported in Table 15 of Appendix B.
Table 4 Descriptive Statistics for MANCOVA (in milliseconds) Back-transformed after Log Transformation CI Variable M LL UL Contemplation Time Sharp 14044.69 8777.97 22471.43 Blur 15677.78 8955.29 27446.67 Typing Time Sharp 41772.77 27173.57 64215.51 Blur 40538.20 27722.51 59278.38
Uniqueness Analyses
Data Handling. Painting responses initially went through a screening process that included a first pass protocol where each response was reviewed to determine whether it was either an attempt to answer or an attempt to omit. Regarding the latter, the goal was to locate responses that seemed frivolous or otherwise ill-natured. No responses were identified as attempts to omit. Three expert, independent raters—MFA students in the visual arts with no prior knowledge of the study’s intentions—were then brought into the lab to assess the uniqueness of each response. Raters worked in the lab for 2-3 hours per day for 3-4 days and were compensated $200 for their time. The protocol was to work in 37 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 blocks of responses. Each block contained all 127 responses for each painting in a randomized order. Each block started with the raters taking 5 minutes to familiarize themselves with the entire sample of responses to one painting in order to get a sense of the range and frequencies of themes found in the sample. They were then given 25 minutes to individually assess the uniqueness of each response while having the source painting on screen as a reference. Raters were then given an additional 10 minutes to review their scores. This allowed raters to make adjustments after having more exposure to the range and frequencies of themes found in the entire sample. After each block the raters took a 5-minute break to combat rater fatigue. In assessing the reliability in their uniqueness scores, the three raters were shown to have strong reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = .90). Furthermore, removing any one rater reduced reliability. As such, the mean of the three raters’ scores for each response represents the uniqueness score.
Analysis. Table 5 shows the means and standard deviations for both uniqueness scores and expertise across both conditions. A multiple linear regression was used to assess any effects of condition and expertise on uniqueness. Assumptions of regression were analyzed using visual and numeric methods; see Appendix C for more information on procedures, as well as graphs and tables related to assumption testing. A significant overall regression effect was found F(3,123) = 8.24, p < .001, R2 = 0.15; thus, the combined effects of expertise and condition explains 15% of the variance in uniqueness of participant responses. The final model summary is reported in Table 6.
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Table 5
Descriptive Statistics for Uniqueness and Expertise by Condition Variable M SD Uniqueness scores
Sharp 2.87 0.69 Blur 3.14 0.80 Expertise
Sharp 8.41 5.457 Blur 7.84 6.450
Table 6
Final Model Summary: Multiple Linear Regression Analysis Predicting Uniqueness Across Conditions and Expertise Levels. B SE t p Intercept 2.85 0.09 33.00 < .001 Condition: Blur 0.30 0.12 2.40 0.02* Expertise (centered) 0.03 0.02 2.05 0.04* Condition * Expertise 0.02 0.02 1.04 0.30
The regression shows significant main effects of both expertise and condition with a resulting non-significant interaction (Table 6). The standardized regression coefficient (slope) for Expertise was β = 0.26, demonstrating that for every 1-point increase in Expertise, the model predicts a .26 unit increase in a response’s uniqueness.
Finally, the manipulation's impact was captured in the uniqueness differences across conditions. Here, condition was dummy coded to allow for the interpretation of the unstandardized regression coefficient (β = 0.30). The resulting interpretation is straightforward and central to the underlining intention of the current project—the model predicts the responses of those in the blur condition (M = 3.14) to be, on average, .30 units more unique than those in the sharp condition (M = 2.87).
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Figure 8. Sharp and Blur condition plots with the relationship between uniqueness and expertise. While condition and expertise do not interact, the main effect of each is evident. Discussion
Study 2’s attempt to test the visual clarity manipulation in the more open-ended context of art viewing demonstrated two relationships. First, expertise positively impacted the level of uniqueness in responses during an art-viewing experience.
Secondly, that reduced visual clarity also positively impacted uniqueness. Additionally, multiple linear regression calculates main effects of each predictor variable by way of controlling for other predictor variables. Because of this, we can say both of these effects occurred independently of each other. Finally, the differences in uniqueness found across viewing condition had no relationship to engagement times as suggested in the non- significant results of the time on task analysis.
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CHAPTER 3 GENERAL DISCUSSION
The two studies reported here attempted to test the viability of reduced visual clarity acting as a perceptual intervention capable of having a positive influence on creative performance. To this end, the relevant literature suggests that there is a constraining effect of obvious ideas stemming from a learned predisposition to perceptually orientate to visual stimuli in a utilitarian fashion. The resulting consequence is that we tend to respond more automatically to what we perceive visually, which in turn, hinders creativity. The current project’s primary goal was to investigate if a reduced visual clarity intervention could alleviate aspects of this predisposition which, in turn, was believed to stimulate the use of more imaginative faculties during an art-viewing experience.
Study 1 tested the manipulation’s effectiveness within the context of a focused, goal-directed task. The findings suggest that, within such a limiting context, the manipulation was unable to impact associative behavior to the degree of capturing improvements in the levels of creativity in the blurred condition’s verb responses. Study
2, however, was a direct investigation into the project’s central thesis with the same manipulation applied to a rationale synthesized across various literatures. This positioned study 2 as a novel investigation of the imagination’s role in the more open-ended context of an art-viewing experience while employing assessment tools re-appropriated from the divergent thinking literature. To accomplish this, it was useful to first, demonstrate a positive relationship between art-specific expertise and the levels of uniqueness in art viewing responses. Such a relationship has, elsewhere, been indirectly determined
41 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 through work connecting art education with both improved creativity (Sator, Bullock, &
MacKinnon, 2018; Sowden, Clements, Redlich, & Lewis, 2015) as well as divergent thinking (Hoffman, Ivcevic, & Maliakkal, 2018) but not directly located in the art- viewing context. Following this was the primary goal of investigating whether the manipulation could evoke higher levels of uniqueness in the experimental condition with particular emphasis placed on assessing the performance of those with lower levels of art- specific expertise to determine how well their responses corresponded to responses of people with higher levels art-specific expertise in the control condition.
The effect of expertise
Study 2 showed that as we gain art-specific knowledge, our responses to art become less common and more unique. This same response characteristic of uniqueness is commonly used to quantify divergent thinking (Acar & Runco, 2014; Beaty & Silvia,
2012; Gupta et al., 2012). Divergent thinking is considered a well-validated measure of creativity (Beaty, Smeekens, Silvia, Hodges, & Kane, 2013; Kaufman, Plucker, & Baer,
2008) as well as strong evaluative tool for assessing the use of one’s imaginative faculties
(Jung, 2014). With all this in mind, Study 2’s main effect of expertise as measured using the aesthetic fluency scale was associated with responses that were more unique of responses. This finding is consistent with the claim, made elsewhere, that our imaginative faculties also play a role during the art-viewing experience (Eckhoff & Urbach, 2008;
Fenner, 2003; Housen, 2007; Joy & Sherry, 2003; Marković, 2012; Tinio, 2013).
From the divergent thinking literature, we can consider a creative generation task as a problem that allows for multiple possible solutions so as to measure various markers of divergent thinking. We can argue that art "for art's sake" has a similar intention as it is
42 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 meant for its own sake (i.e., to not have a definitive purpose outside of providing a contemplative experience that offers a variety of interpretative avenues). If we consider such art similarly to that of the creative generation task then, we can begin to posit that art-viewing might also similarly involve both creativity efforts; the effort to enact some inhibitory control to overcome the constraining effect of obvious ideas (Camarda et al.,
2018) as well as the additional effort necessary to generate multiple possible solutions rather than one correct understanding (Milbrandt & Milbrandt, 2011; Reiter-Palmon et al., 1997).
It is also possible that Study 2’s findings can be seen as aligning with the assertion that aesthetic appreciation requires both detachment from everyday concerns as well as suppression from being reliant on easily accessible semantic information
(Cupchik et al., 2009; Leder et al., 2004) and that such behavior is commonly found only in art viewers with higher levels of art-specific expertise who actively disregard semantic information from interfering with their experience (Belke et al., 2006; Cupchik &
Gebotys, 1988; Cupchik et al., 2009; Winston & Cupchik, 1992) as a means to be more contemplative of an artwork by exploring farther into their semantic memory (Belke et al., 2006; Cupchik, et al., 2009; Cupchik & Winston, 1996; Winston & Cupchik, 1992).
What is necessary then is for further work to directly investigate if the relationship between expertise and increased uniqueness also reflects a more contemplative approach to move past the artwork’s subject matter as a means to engage with it in a more exploratory manner.
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The effect of reduced visual clarity.
This project’s central thesis was to determine if reduced visual clarity can act as a viable perceptual intervention capable of positively impacting creative performance during the art-viewing experience. The specific goal was to see if such an intervention could allow people with lower levels of art-specific expertise to respond to art in a manner more similar to those with higher levels of such expertise. This was reasoned because those higher in art-specific expertise are said to demonstrate a degree of detachment from everyday concerns and suppression from being overly reliant on semantic information; such behaviors are believed to be necessary for aesthetic appreciation (Cupchik et al., 2009; Leder et al., 2004). And, as mentioned, such engagements are reminiscent of the efforts involved in creative thinking.
Study 2 captured initial support for this claim by showing the intervention had a positive impact on a widely used creativity proxy marker with an open-ended task of simply typing 1-2 sentences of what comes to mind while viewing paintings. Those who viewed the blurred VR video produced responses that were significantly more unique than those who viewed the sharp version. The search for this effect was grounded in past work showing that blurring a visual field below our recognition threshold, producing a struggle to perceptually engage the resulting ambiguity. This struggle can be understood as the negative impact visual ambiguity has on our ability to quickly identify semantic information (Costen et al., 1994, 1996; Collishaw & Hole, 2000; Parker & Costen, 1999) while also having no negative impact on visual detection and visual vigilance (Lehtonen
& Lehtinen, 1972; Coubard et al., 2011). It is believed that struggling with the resulting ambiguity causes us to take a more intentionally, exploratory approach to what we see by
44 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 becoming more broadly receptive to global visual features (Shulman et al., 1986;
Shulman & Wilson, 1987; Hekkert, 1995; Robertson, 1996). Additionally, this relationship between a more exploratory approach to global features rather than local features (Oliva & Torralba, 2006) aligns closely with research showing reduced visual clarity activating brain regions associated with creativity (Jung et al., 2010; Jung, Mead,
Carrasco, & Flores, 2013), more imaginative thinking (Smallwood et al., 2016), spontaneous, self-generated content (Blakemore et al., 2010), as well as the free exploration of a virtual environment (Maguire et al., 1998).
Elsewhere, research shows both additive and subtractive situational factors that are capable of regulating the extensiveness of spreading activation are also capable of having a beneficial impact on subsequent creative performance. In an additive sense, forcing participants to attend to a larger visual area, as opposed to a more restricted visual area, has a subsequent effect of generating a broader conceptual attention that improves creativity (Friedman et al., 2003). In a subtractive sense, creative performance during an unusual uses task for common objects is positively impacted when an image of the common object does not accompany the task while accompanying the task with the object’s image actually impaired creativity (George et al., 2019). This type of functional fixedness is said to have a constraining effect on creativity by way of narrowing how people access semantic memory during creative problem-solving tasks (Chrysikou et al.,
2016). These past findings easily fit within the associative gradient framework.
Introducing a broader field of information will broaden our attention while withholding easily recognizable information helps prevent us from applying a narrower attention.
Both seem to produce the same result; flattening of the associative gradient: The additive
45 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 by directly allowing weaker, more remote associations to become competitive in a broader conceptual space. The subtractive by intentionally eliminating the strongest activation of near associates and their disruptive and overpowering influence that encourages obvious ideas.
This allows us to also place study 2’s results within the associative gradient framework. It can be said that the blurred video flattened the associate gradients of those exposed to it by both introducing new information in the form of impenetrable visual ambiguity that, in-of-itself, offers no near associates to fixate on while also simultaneously removing the disruption of any strongly activated near associates that were present in the sharp video. This interpretation is feasible considering that a flatter associate gradient is theorized as being responsible for more spontaneous, weaker associates becoming more competitive (Martindale, 1995; Mednick, 1962) with clear evidence of this in study 2 with the experimental condition’s responses being significantly more unique than those in the control condition.
Study 2 supports the claim that reduced visual clarity can act as a viable perceptual intervention in benefiting creative performance. More theoretically, the manipulation appears capable of dampening aspects of our predisposed, utilitarian orientation. This dampening seems to occur in some relationship with the onset of a more contemplative perceptual orientation. Study 2 also suggests that we can maintain such an approach if the conditions of unresolvable ambiguity are immediately followed by an open-ended task such as that of expressing what comes to mind while looking at a painting.
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Limitations and insights to creativity’s idiosyncrasies.
Unlike study 2, study 1 did not directly capture the manipulation's effect.
Considering the possible reasons for this helps illuminate some of creativity's remaining idiosyncrasies. The lack of significant results in study 1 suggested reduced visual clarity had little to no impact on the associative behaviors involved in the verb generation task.
Specifically, design aspects in study 1 were potentially impactful in this regard. First, unlike study 2's more open-ended task, study 1 administered explicit instructions to be creative, and these instructions were applied to a specific goal-directed task to only produce a one verb response. All of these characteristics can arguably constrict the possible range of responses. A stimulus to contemplate and respond to can be classified in terms of the extent to which it intrinsically imposes constraints on any resulting response (Barch et al., 2000) If so, this would especially true if the stimuli is a single noun and the task is to provide a single verb.
Furthermore, explicit instructions to be creative are shown to have a facilitating effect on divergent thinking (Chand & Runco, 1993) that increases the quantity of original responses (Baughman & Mumford, 1995). It has also been proposed that everyone has some personal range of performing creatively and that being given explicit instructions to do so positions us to perform maximally within our personal range
(Harrington, 1975; Katz & Poag, 1979). Taken together, these design aspects could be responsible for study 1’s almost identical semantic distance values across the two conditions of randomly assigned participants. If this is the case, the explicit instructions to be creative in the constraining context of word-to-word associations would have equally positioned both conditions to perform maximally in creatively generating their
47 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 verb responses. It is possible, then, that a ceiling effect was captured that left no additional headroom for the visual clarity manipulation to quantitatively impact the creativity of those in the blurred condition.
Additionally, it is still hotly debated whether the underlining mechanisms of creativity are better understood as domain-general or domain-specific (See Kaufman,
Glaveanu & Baer, 2017, for a review of each position). Those who see creativity as being a predominantly domain-specific ability (Silvia, Kaufman & Pretz, 2009) argue that creativity is dependent on the organization of semantic information being distributed across various domains while existing in some relationship to the mode in which that knowledge was acquired (Saffren, Coslett, & Keener, 2003). We find this in how different domains influence the retrieval of object knowledge with verbal stimuli more readily allowing access to lexical information than pictorial stimuli (Chrysikou et al.,
2016). It is also posited that domain specificity is most evident in visual creativity
(Palmiero et al., 2010) with visuospatial faculties heavily impacting one's capacity for visual creativity (Perez-Fabello & Campos, 2007). Under this logic, it is possible that the pictorial format of the reduced visual clarity manipulation had more creativity-related consequences on study 2’s paintings than on study 1’s nouns.
Conclusions and Future Directions
In terms of how we perceptually approach the visual world around us, the effect of the reduced visual clarity manipulation can be considered an enhancement that temporarily broadens our approach. However, it might be more useful to conceptualize the effect in terms of our need for inhibitory control in order to be creative (Camarda et al., 2018). In these terms, study 2's effects could be suggestive of a temporary alleviation
48 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 of restraints put in place by a predisposed perceptual orientation. In cases when individuals have difficulty in actively shifting their perceptual orientation—at least in the art viewing context—short exposure periods to a blurred visual field might provide a sort of temporary cache-cleaning of the mechanisms driving an inclination to unconsciously respond to what we see in a habitually, uncreative manner.
From here, there is one obvious and two conceivable directions to take this line of reasoning; first, the use of a visual clarity manipulation needs to be further investigated to better understand the cognitive mechanisms it impacts. Along with this work, a variety of parameters need to be established. How blurred does the visual field need to be in order to consistently see more creative results? Does two minutes of exposure have similar effects as five minutes? What are the consequences of placing someone in a blurred environment for 10 minutes or more? How limited is the range of tasks in which such an intervention can have a beneficial effect? Can such an intervention be shown to improve one’s ability to solve other problems that are more specific and goal-directed?
The completion of such work might encourage two other, more hypothetical directions. One being an applied direction to explore different contexts in which a manipulation that positively impacts one's creativity can be beneficial to the everyday needs of a general audience. It seems reasonable that some of us search for ways to temporarily improve our creativity when we find it challenging to generate possible solutions for some ongoing and tenacious problem. Research with such people in mind would go a long way in determining the feasibility and applicability of a user-friendly and convenient perceptual intervention such as a VR headset to immerse oneself in a
49 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 blurred visual environment to provide oneself with some release from the restraints of disruptive and overly activated obvious ideas.
Secondly, our utilitarian perceptual disposition—that cultivated, habitual aspect of how we navigate and respond to the visual world around us—functions extremely well within, and is continually supported by, a consumer culture that prioritizes and celebrates high definition visual clarity. In light of the current project and what other work might eventually find, it could eventually become reasonable to claim that such a disposition may actually be detrimental to our capacity for being imaginative individuals.
50 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
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APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
EXTENDED LITERATURE REVIEW
I’m bringing sexy back. –Justin Timberlake
The word aesthetic comes from the early Greek aisthēta and later variant aisthetikos. Originally these ancient terms signified an unadulterated form of perception only by the senses and uncorrupted by knowledge. Concerning vision, these words were meant to reference the perception of things as they were—in and of themselves—not as they were known culturally (Aesthetic, n.d.; Aesthetic, 1989). Ancient Greek thinkers and even church leaders spoke of aisthēta as the contrast to noeta as a way of highlighting the distinction between seeing the purely sensual aspects of an object as opposed to considering that same objects through logic and intellect (Baumgarten, 1735/1954;
Wessell, 1972). This emphasizing of such a distinction across a community clearly demonstrates that some value or significance was placed, long ago, on the notion of being receptive to an experience's purely sensory features without the need to place human agency on top of it through knowable facts and already established conclusions from intellectual concepts.
This ancient notion persisted until the 18th century when aesthetic lost sight of its unsophisticated origins in the master's thesis of Alexander Baumgarten (1750/1986). The
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21-year-old proposed a new science of perception and christened this pseudo-rigorous approach to what is sensed and imagined as the aesthetics (Guyer, 2007). In doing so, he brought forward the inclusion of rational thinking to the term aesthetics which ultimately encouraged others to further weave intellectual concepts into the expanding construct of what aesthetics signified. Eventually, this laid the groundwork for aesthetics becoming its own discipline within philosophy.
Since Baumgarten, writers have continually cherry-picked previous assertions from this growing literature as fodder in their effort to extend the discourse. And this lineage is alive and well considering that what follows is a perfect example of it. But here, the criticism is of the discourse itself; that its lineage has over-intellectualized aesthetics so much that it is currently divorced from its original meaning across various literatures. We find examples in multiple discourses where aesthetics is now dominated by concerns regarding opinions on taste, meaningfulness and knowable facts that are far more appropriate and applicable to one's cultural experience than they are to one's aesthetic experience of a purely perceptual encounter. Much of this has found its way into empirical aesthetics; leading yet another discourse astray to pursue a distorted conceptualization of what constitutes an aesthetic experience by emphasizing an object's cultural significance rather than its purely sensory physicality.
Consider the field of material culture; a literature that grew out of art history and anthropology and places emphasis on the cultural regards we hold for objects.
Specifically, material culture focuses on human agency in both creating and using objects alongside the ideologies we culturally cultivate for them (Ingold, 2007). Objects can play the role of being tools, providing entertainment, being gifts, and even commodities that
70 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 carry significance across both social interactions and larger economic contexts (Law,
2000). This, then, is how we cultivate everyday value; by imbuing meaningfulness onto objects across time. But this emphasis often comes at the cost of disregarding the materiality of the object; it's purely sensory presentation to us. Specifically, we come to overlook the object's syntactic information; its surface, its texture and even the amount of space it physically occupies. The general disregard for this information type carries with it the neglect of addressing how we perceptual engage an object's physicality on an emotional (Dudley, 2012), and ultimately, individualized level. This neglect of syntactic information is a consequence that is reflected in both the overall material culture literature's priorities (Dudley, 2012, 2013) as well as in each of our perceptual dispositions to prioritize the search for usefulness and meaning in the objects we encounter.
There is also a contagious nature to this logic. We find this in how the material culture’s approach has guided its closely related field of museum studies which, subsequently, is occasionally integrated into the background literature of empirical aesthetics. In museum studies, the broad focus is on efforts to understand the audience better—justifiably done as a means to improve levels of audience interaction with museum objects (Dudley, 2013; Tinio & Smith, 2014). But these efforts, however, are generally focused on improving the manner in which these interactions are imbued with cultural meaning regarding historical significance, production and or consumption. Doing so has been argued as antithetical to the actual appreciation of aesthetics as it creates a void in supporting a viewer’s capacity for a more materialist approach towards interacting with the physicality of museum objects (Dudley, 2012; 2013; O’Neill, 2006).
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These conclusions are reflected elsewhere by museum studies demonstrating that inexperienced audiences—as opposed to those with art specific expertise—tend to enter a museum under the pretense to learn and culturally enrich themselves (Mastandrea,
Bartoli, & Bove, 2007). Such expectations are also further shown to be more representative of those interested in visiting historically significant artworks than those interested in seeing contemporary artworks (Tinio & Smith, 2014).
All of this begins to address how and why aspects of cultural significance have been passed onto and deeply situated across the larger aesthetics discourse, allowing these cultural aspects to have ultimately been persuasively embedded into a mistaken understanding of the components that makes up an aesthetic experience in the rationale of some researchers running empirical experiments on the matter.
Why is this criticism relevant here? Because, as a sub-class of all objects, aesthetic objects are just as susceptible as other objects to being imbued with cultural meaning or falsely imposed upon with some degree of everyday usefulness. We will pinpoint this effect exactly in the research done with novice art viewers and their inclination to disregard the purely sensory aspects of artworks as irrelevant when attempting only to comprehend rather than contemplate a work of art.
This leads to a vital assertion of the following proposal; that aesthetic value comes solely from the contemplation of what is physically present in an object rather than to try to ascertain some declarative understanding of it through culturally imbued meaning and everyday value. Because of this assertion most of the rationale covered in the following pages focuses on establishing the justification for a single, definitive statement; that our overall cognitive system is not well-equipped to both comprehend and
72 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 contemplate simultaneously. On the surface, this claim should not be overly remarkable—considering that the underlining mechanisms governing these two efforts can be reasonably argued as diametrically opposed. One regards the exploitatory behavior and convergent thinking that functions in the service of arriving at some conclusive understanding. The other refers to the exploratory behavior and divergent thinking that facilitated the generation of multiple options that may or may not be potentially insightful or useful towards a more flexible, individualized form of resolution.
It is, however, the distinction of these two efforts that is of key importance in appreciating the central theme of this proposal; that to access the aesthetic value of an encounter, our perceptual approach to that encounter must differ from that of our utilitarian, perceptual orientation. It is here, then, that we begin with a review of various literatures and a variety of empirical work that address these conflicting efforts as well as their distinguishable antecedents and consequences.
The philosophy of disinterest, distance, and detachment away from personal relevancy.
We begin with a parallel line of reasoning from philosophical aesthetics that presents the dichotomous nature of our perceptual orientation and consequences relevant to the distinction between comprehension and contemplation. First, we find Anthony, the
3rd Earl of Shaftesbury's (1711/1964) assertion that a disinterested enjoyment of a scenic view is for its own perceptual sake while an interested pleasure of the same view follows some expected benefits such as potentially owning the surrounding land.
Kant's critique of judgment (1790/1987) argues that how we assess an object's level of goodness, i.e., agreeableness, is based on our judgment of its capacity to reach
73 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 some prior expectation we have of its usefulness. For Kant, expectations reflect an invested interest. And along with these judgments of goodness comes a subjective sense of pleasure when something reaches or exceeds our expectations. Kant's ideas regarding this emotional impact of expectations aligns with what we now know as the hedonic marker of fluency (Reber & Schwarz, 2006) where this sense of agreeableness leading to pleasure has been attributed to artworks that offer processing fluency that exceeds our expectations (Reber, 2012; Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004; Winkielman, Schwarz,
Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003). But, for Kant, this leaves no room for contemplation.
Having an expectation is akin to putting something in a box and judging the object holistically merely by how well it fits in the box. Being detached from expectations, in
Kant's notion, is the disinterested interest that allows for the imagination to consume our intellectual space instead of expectations.
Shortly after Kant, Schopenhauer (1818/1969) asserted that the activation of intellectual control allows for deeper levels of appreciation. He claimed that everyday consciousness is driven by a will preoccupied with personally relevant desires. But, one can employ the intellect to temporarily quiet this will thus, allowing for a momentary state of disinterested interest. His reference to intellect closely resembles a central point in the following rationale; the importance of executive functioning in creative thinking
(Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk & Benedek, 2014) as the means to block the interference of salient information that is simultaneously overly activated and momentarily irrelevant.
Together, Kant and Schopenhauer argue that we are cognitively capable of temporarily moving past the obstructions of a predisposed utilitarian, perceptual orientation to reach a disinterested perspective by way of intentional determination.
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Elsewhere we find others address the reaching of this disinterested perspective in the absence of any intentionality.
Edmund Burke (1759/2009) and Edward Bullough (1914) present this as the spontaneous occurrences of the sublime. Both addressed its abrupt manifestation and how it suddenly brings about an explicit awareness of one's lacking comprehension when encountering overwhelming vastness. They both explore how the typical response in such situations is the realization that one will never fully comprehend the immensity of their current experience. Such an awareness of something being so incomprehensible—like a firsthand glance of the Milky Way galaxy while sitting in an open field, miles away from any light pollution—not only allows for a momentary glimpse into how expansive our universe is but also creates an instant fascination with our insignificance and fragility; a level of engagement in what we are seeing that we would have been entirely oblivious to us just seconds earlier.
Both Burke and Bullough additionally consider the similarities between the sense of the sublime and the aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. Burke (1759/2009) posited that a sudden encounter with a life-threatening situation—like standing at the edge of the
Grand Canyon—could, unexpectedly, awaken a quizzical sense of delight akin to aesthetic amazement. For Bullough (1914), The instant detachment from a desperate, life- affirming search for relevancy in anything ordinary or familiar is replaced with a disinterested perspective onto ourselves and our surroundings. This occurs as time begins to distort and fascination amasses for events as they start to unfold slowly before us.
Bullough believes this disinterested perspective is the same that benefits one's aesthetic experience. Worth noting here is that the environment and its sensory information remain
75 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 constant across this unexpected shift from one instance to another. It is only us, and our perceptual orientation that becomes more distant.
This leads to Edward Bullough's nomenclature psychical distance and how it addresses the impact of personal relevance on our perceptual orientation. In short, to properly access an encounter's aesthetic values we either need such distance to be created or reached. Creating distance occurs externally by manipulating the visual features of an object or event to make it more challenging to generate common associates to daily life.
This pushes the mind to extend farther into imaginative territory. Such logic guides the creation of artworks that try not to imitate nature, and they do so in their efforts to offer contemplation, not comprehension. Bullough considers this type of artwork as an end in and of itself; commonly referred to as ‘art for art sake.'
Secondly, distance can be reached irrespective of how recognizable an object's visual features may be by shifting our mindset away from its instinctual drive to search for personal relevance in what we encounter. Bullough refers to this drive as the lure of everyday life which makes the shifting mindset difficult to enact intentionally because our instinctual drive is a preferred approach that causes us to become accustomed to
"under-distanced" encounters. This can, unfortunately, include our encounters with artworks and therein lies the problem for mimetic artworks. The stylistic features
(brushstroke, composition, color scheme, etc.) that provide access to aesthetic value are also responsible for the physical presentation of the depiction's mimetic characteristics. In such cases, the stylistic features are overlooked as they—in of themselves—offer no everyday value towards our search for personal relevance. In encountering such artworks,
76 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 we must reach distance internally and with intentionality to access the aesthetic value of such usually discarded visual features.
Collectively, these thinkers present consistent themes central to the remaining rationale. First, that our perceptual orientation towards what we visually encounter can be understood as existing on a spectrum between a more utilitarian approach to comprehending something's usefulness and a more contemplative approach allowing for an encounter's aesthetic value to become accessible. Aligning with these separate perceptual approaches is a secondary distinction between encounter types. Everyday objects usually provide easily recognizable usefulness towards some other larger goal while aesthetic objects are agued to serve no function outside of their own contemplation and thus represent ends in and of themselves. So far it has been suggested that shifting one's mindset between these approaches and encounter types can occur both voluntarily and involuntarily. And while none of these thinkers stated it explicitly, their conclusions also imply that a perceptual shift to a more aesthetically conducive orientation is within reach of a broader audience.
We next move to fortify this theoretical foundation by reviewing various assertions from within cognitive psychology and empirical aesthetics that align with these themes. Abraham Maslow (1968/2013) presented attention—in his treatment of the peak experience phenomenon—as being fully engaged with an object while being detached from its purpose and usefulness. For Maslow, such experiences were also believed to be accompanied by spontaneity and expressiveness. Similarly, it has also been posited that an aesthetic experience requires some degree of suppression of everyday concerns
(Cupchik & Winston, 1996) as well as requiring an aesthetic orientation to initiate the
77 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 actual perceptual processes that distinguish an aesthetic experience from its more common, everyday counterpart (Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004). This is reiterated in Markovic’s (2010) reasoning that objects of aesthetic fascination are fundamentally perceived differently than objects and situations that offer everyday value.
All of this leads to the how the aesthetic experience is understood in the current proposal; as an exceptional state of mind where an object transcends any pragmatic meaning to become symbolically meaningful (Markovic, 2012).
Actual research findings also support our perceptual orientation existing on a spectrum. Specifically, Cupchik, Vartanian, Crawley, & Mikulis (2009) showed distinctions in functional connectivity according to one's perceptual approach when engaging an artwork. They found different cortical activation per which orientation participants were asked to apply to their art-viewing experience. A fMRI contrast on promoting either a pragmatic or aesthetic viewing condition revealed ROI distinctions; specifically, higher activity in the occipital regions, particularly the right fusiform gyrus, was more closely associated with the pragmatic orientation of being asked to use an everyday informational approach to understand a painting's content and narrative. Such areas are reportedly related to the perception of object categories; especially faces
(Martin et al., 1996). The aesthetic orientation, on the other hand, produced higher activity in the right and left insula—more commonly associated with emotional processing (Lane et al., 1997; Paradiso et al., 1999)—when participants were explicitly asked to focus on colors, composition and the overall mood of the artwork. In their interpretation, Cupchik et al., (2009) acknowledged that their findings pointed to a distinction between experiencing something as it is—in and of itself—rather than as it is
78 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 already known. Additionally, perceiving something in and of itself has been said to be problematic for novices who unconsciously rely too heavily on the automaticity involved in object-identification during their art viewing experiences (Cupchik & Gebotys,
1988; Cupchik et al., 1992; Winston & Cupchik, 1992).
This further allowed Cupchik et al., (2009) to conclude that adopting an aesthetic orientation likely requires some degree of overcoming the cognitive system's preference to automatically retrieving semantic categories and to reallocate such resources to the sensory presentation to the object's syntactic information instead. This logic traces Miller and Cohen's (2001) claim that the PFC can impose top-down, inhibitory control over the more automatic processing of external inputs when such information is deemed irrelevant. When combined, these assertions formed the rationale for Cattaneo et al.,
2013) use of transcranial direct, excitability current stimulation over the left dorsolateral
PFC as a means to force-shift participants' orientation from a pragmatic to aesthetic approach by modulating the activity of the lDLPFC while exposed to a variety of visual art mediums and stylistic approaches. They concluded that the increased activity in this region brought about a disengagement from a more habituated manner of automatically retrieving semantic categories in the usual service of identifying objects. They reported significantly higher post-stimulation liking assessments which they used as a proxy of aesthetic appreciation. This allowed Cattaneo et al., (2013) to claim to have demonstrated higher levels of aesthetic appreciation through transcranial direct current stimulation and thus concluded to have successfully shifted participants' perceptual orientation.
All of this provides the general, theoretical framework central for the studies currently being proposed. Specifically, what is being proposed is to similarly illicit this
79 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 perceptual shift but in a more ecologically valid manner that offers potential applicability to cultural institutions to employ as a means to enable deeper aesthetic experiences in audience members beyond that of their current efforts to only prioritize their audiences’ cultural experience.
Next, we review key aspects of how different information types are visually perceived in the context of a vast literature distinguishing novice from expert art-viewing experiences and how information types play a significant role in our perceptual orientation. Explicitly, the following section concerns our strong disposition towards object identification. This then brings us to review the empirical literature's findings regarding the experiential differences between expert and novice art viewing experiences and how the distinction between engaging with semantic and syntactic information is a central aspect used by researchers to differentiate these two groups.
Information type and expertise interact to dictate the depth of perceptual engagement.
Central to this section is the brain’s strong tendency to both activate and evaluate semantic meaning rapidly and without the need for conscious control (Fazio,
Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986). Such behavior also extends to how we evaluate objects automatically (Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu,
Powell, & Kardes, 1986; Glaser & Banaji, 1999; Greenwald, Draine, & Abrams, 1996).
And here, we will establish how these behaviors put many of us at an initial disadvantage regarding our ability to access aesthetic value as it pertains to the purely sensory physicality of an aesthetic object's presentation.
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J. J. Gibson, (1971) posited that humans possess a cognitive bias towards semantic information and its ability to be readily referential at the cognitive level over that of syntactic information's ambiguously felt sensation. This is because semantic information allows for visual processing to be easily accompanied by verbal processing's well-established vocabulary and stored category knowledge while the purely visual processing of syntactic information lacks such a knowledge base of useful associates
(Gibson, 1971). This leaves syntactic information to be more ambiguous because we have yet to establish cultural rules to govern either its encoding or interpretation (Kolers,
1973).
The feature distinctions between these two information types will help us expound on these conclusions. First, semantic information denotes external objects which is crucial to representationalism (Berlyne 1971; Cupchik, 1992); a term signifying naturalism in art which is a depiction's efforts to mimic nature's likeness. Accordingly, the semantic information contained within a visual depiction is closely bound up with the representation's mimetic qualities thus, allowing object recognition to come out of semantic information. As such, in our exposure to representational semantic information, we are also exposed to (all the information necessary to denote a lexical identity to that which we register as the subject matter of a work of art (Saint-Martin, 1987). This is also crucial to why many of us ignore syntactic information.
Syntactic information, on the other hand, constitutes the physicality of the perceivable elements that make up the object’s purely sensory presentation. Specifically, in the case of a painting, this would include its surface qualities and physical aspects that allow for the presentation of semantic information. To put it simply; syntactic
81 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 information is the ‘how’ in how subject matter and narrative elements are presented to us.
And, the argument being established here is that accessing aesthetic value centers on how receptive we allow ourselves to be to this information type. Even more relevant to aesthetic value is our receptivity to the resulting relational interactions between various syntactic elements and how these interactions can only be constrained by the physicality of the artwork’s medium.
Regularity of response behaviors. Syntactic information's nonexistent cache of readily-accessible associates discourages us from engaging with it which, in turn, lead many of us to have a general scarcity of experience trying to attend to it. This factors into the reasoning of why we primarily only attend to the features of object and events that offer well-defined and useful, associations (Cupchik, 1995; Cupchik, Winston, & Herz,
1992). As Gibson (1971, p. 31) asserted, such purely visual sensations are "a sort of luxury, incidental to the serious business of perceiving the world." Such serious business, in Berlyne's (1974) logic, regards the extrinsic motivation of everyday activities being practical and goal orientated. All of this is further buttressed by the consensus that we prioritize semantic information in the vast majority of our perceptual encounters (Bar,
2003; Cupchik, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1998; Marszalek & Schmid, 2007; Moles, 1958). In addition to this are the levels of efficiency and automaticity (Glaser & Bandai, 1999) addressed in how attention modulation of sensory adaptations such as the sharpening model (Li, Miller, & Desimone, 1993) and facilitation model (Gauthier, 2006) assist us perceptually by improving the coding of similar stimulus features of successive encounters as a means to further accelerate identification processes. The takeaway here is to appreciate that along with our preference for semantic information comes a degree of
82 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 regularity in our response behaviors to it that comes out of exploiting verbal processing's well-established vocabulary and stored category knowledge that we develop over time.
There is, of course, a niche cultural establishment that attempts to promote some consistency in our response behaviors to some specific sub-types of syntactic information. The problem is that access to developing this knowledge base requires either an extensive involvement in the art-world or a serious commitment to obtaining a formal art education. What both of these allow for is the experience to competently and preferentially engage with stylistic features. But there are a few stylistic feature associations that have seeped into the awareness of the general audience. Most notably is the mass-appeal of impressionistic paint application, frequently interpreted as expressive and indicative of a static depiction being perceiving as a fleeting moment (Arnheim,
1974). But it is also worth noting here that this stylistic feature's ability to gathering a predictable, and acceptable, response behavior across a broad audience did not occur overnight. The now coveted, impressionistic brushstroke—when introduced over 150 years ago—was considered borderline treacherous and initially received with hatred and hostility by an instantly aversive public.
This brings us precisely to how we approach and generate meaning from aesthetic objects. To start, we must understand that semantic information is couched within the artist's, often intentional and/or well-practiced, application of syntactic information as their only means to showcase their unique artistic style. For Moles, (1958) semantic information is applied by an artist logically in a utilitarian approach to providing useful information. On the other hand, syntactic information is constrained by the medium while also adhering—to some degree—to the medium's traditional, stylistic manners.
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Originality, then, is not found in the recognition of subject matter but rather in the uniqueness of the work's syntactic presentation. As such, it follows that the artists who become noteworthy for their originality are those who find novel and exciting ways to breach the limitations of their medium's physicality (Moles, 1958).
In following this logic, it is also not the content/subject matter, but rather, again, the syntactic information and its lack of regularities in any definitive, correct way to encode (Gibson, 1971) or any singular, orthodox strategy to interpret (Kolers, 1973) that allows us to generate a variety of interpretations as art viewers. According to Berlyne’s
(1974) rationale, this is because the syntactic information in stylistic features impact arousal independent of semantic information’s imbued meaning. This brings us to
Berlyne being possibly the earliest in empirical aesthetics to articulate a key aesthetics- related distinction between these information types; that appreciating something as an experience—in and of itself—offers a balance between unity and novelty in visual features that can be “interesting in themselves regardless of their representational content” (Berlyne, 1949, p.193).
Consider representational art. Because we have an easily accessible knowledge base that is automatically triggered by the perception of semantic information, all we need to do, then, is merely evaluate representational art as we would any other everyday encounter. This, then, provides representational art with a sort of regularity of meaning across a broad audience. If we generally develop similar associates to an everyday object, then it is assumed that we would respond similarly to an image of that object. Rooted within this logic is its opposite effect for abstract art's lack of semantic content; that an absence of regularity in responses is a consequence of lacking recognizable content. This,
84 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 then, facilitates what we find when comparing novice and expert art viewing experiences; a wider variety of interpretations across different levels of expertise.
Novice and Experts. To better appreciate some of the distinctions of what has been reviewed thus far, we look now to research comparing novice and expert art viewing experiences. This literature will further support how our perceptual approach exists on a spectrum between a utilitarian orientation meant to facilitates concrete understanding of everyday perceptual encounters and a more open, flexible and all around aesthetically conducive orientation that helps advance a more imaginative engagement of perceptual encounters that provide no purpose other than their own contemplation.
The logical place to start is with our capacity for object recognition and how this skill relies heavily on semantic information (Bar, 2003; Marszalek & Schmid, 2007). And since semantic information allows us to distinguish external objects and events (Berlyne,
1971), it logically follows that it also allows us to recognize the identity of subject matter and narrative elements in artworks (Saint-Martin, 1987). The difficulty for the novice is that object recognition’s reliance on semantic information is a fundament component of our predisposed utilitarian, perceptual approach (Cupchik, 1992, 1995, 1998; Moles,
1958). The reason being that this aspect is consistently demonstrated to negatively impact the novice art-viewing experience as they both prioritize the recognition of content through a near-exclusive reliance on semantic information while also displaying a general aversion to stylistic features in a variety of aesthetics-related contexts (Augustin & Leder,
2006; Cupchik, 1994; Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988; Hekkert, 1995; Leder, Belke, Oeberst,
& Augustin, 2004; Nodine, Locher, & Krupinski, 1993; Parsons, 1987; Schmidt,
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McLaughlin, & Leighten, 1989; Winston & Cupchik, 1992). Again, all of this aligns with the novice’s efforts to generating meaning also being shown to rely heavily on how realistic the recognizable content is depicted (Nodine, Locher, & Krupinski, 1993).
The relationship between object recognition and semantic information appears to be an integral aspect of the novice's perceptual orientation during art viewing. This gives credence to the assertion that novices are only willing to draw upon their everyday repertoire of concepts from personal experiences to generate meaning from what is already known (Hekkert et al., 1994; Hekkert, 1995) The degree of novices preferring representational and identifiable human figures even extends to the traditional abstracting approach of cubism (Hekkert, 1995).
This leads to understanding how familiarity acts as an additional obstacle for the novice. The importance given to familiarity has been noted as an intrinsic aspect to in what we encounter in everyday life (Light & Smith, 2005). This aligns with the exploiting of semantic information in the search for familiarity being reflected— understandably so—in novice preference judgments in photographic imagery while experts, on the other hand, demonstrate a preference for photographs providing uncertainty and unfamiliarity (Axelsson, 2007; Foytik et al., 2013) as well as higher levels of complexity and incongruity (Hekkert, 1995). In the overall context of novices interacting with aesthetic objects, the importance given to familiarity is so prevalent
(Hekkert, Snelders, & Wieringen, 2003; Hekkert & van Wieringen, 1990; Leder, 2001;
Pedersen, 1986; Quispel, Maes, & Schilperoord, 2016; Repp, 1997) that it would not be unreasonable to consider familiarity as a sort of perceptual catnip for novices.
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It is possible that this attraction is due to the novice’s general need to reduce uncertainty under unfamiliar and uncomfortable conditions such as being asked to evaluate art (Galindo & Rodríguez, 2000; Cohen & Aston-Jones 2005; Daw et al., 2006).
In following this logic, it can also be suggested that, in a context of attempting to cope with uncertainty, a novice may also likely be highly and implicitly influenced by the hedonic marker of fluency (Winkielman, Schwarz Fazendeiro & Reber, 2003; Reber &
Schwarz, 2006). Here, the unexpected processing fluency of a familiar stimulus in a larger, complex and uncertain context like a museum or even a research laboratory provides—at the very least—a toehold to comfort with a subjectively experienced, positive emotional tone (Reber & Schwarz, 2006).
Expectations are the third influential, factor that constricts the perceptual approach of novices who, more so than experts, bring expectations to bear upon their aesthetic encounters (Cupchik, 1995; Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004; Winston
& Cupchik, 1992). Expectations, as with semantic information and familiarity, is intrinsically tied to our utilitarian perceptual approach that—as our philosophers noted— dominates our daily lives. The conditions that allow semantic identification to be all that is required for one to understand an object's usefulness (Cupchik, 1994, 1998) is said to be closely impacted by ongoing expectations (Crilly, Moultrie, & Clarkson, 2004).
Regarding novices, it has been shown that they specifically approach artworks with the expectation that the encounter should be a source of pleasure or positive arousal
(Cupchik, 1994; Hekkert, 1995). This notion of novice art viewers carrying such an assumption stretches as far back as Birkoff’s (1931) conclusion that general audiences expect to be explicitly rewarded when they give their attention to artworks. Underscoring
87 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 this is that such expectations come out of a misleading impression that art viewing, like many other everyday encounters, is meant to serve as a smaller means to some larger— possibly even vaguely misunderstood—pleasure seeking end. Novices attempt to accomplish this only through whatever literal, personally relevant meaning they can extract from the artworks semantic information rather than attempt to contemplate the encounter as an experience in and of itself.
The most relevant aspect of the literature pertaining to novice and expert art viewing experiences is the evidence that both groups initially enter an aesthetic encounter with the same utilitarian-based responses. Partial support for this in Berlyne and Ogilvie's
(1974) investigations of early-stage visual processing of object recognition. In their findings, no initial differences were found between the rapid judgments of the two groups regarding painting type similarities. Elsewhere a natural grouping task was used by
Augustin & Leder (2006) to probe novice and expert engagement levels by asking them to sort a variety of contemporary artworks into distinct groups and then to follow up with more thoughtful descriptions justifying the distinctions they created. The category responses were similar across the two groups. Here, categories describing semantic information coming from concrete content such as landscape and daily life narrative content in artworks were equally found in both. And yet, in the study's more thoughtful second half, personal relevance became a distinguishing factor when the groups were tasked to give descriptors to justify the categories they generated. Here, the groups separated themselves by what was and was not deemed relevant with the novices' descriptions revealed an emphasis on personal feelings while experts, on the other hand,
88 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 referenced more objective, style and composition related terms (Augustin & Leder,
2006).
These findings are taken to suggest that art viewing experience generally start off being initially similarly across a broad audience and with increased art specific expertise comes a sequential, intensifying shift towards more in-depth, more deliberate engagements. Support for this comes in Augustin & Leder (2006) speculation that experts can release themselves from lingering on literal content to also involve more sophisticated processing. A similar notion was posited by Cupchik (1992) as an expert's capacity to shift away from solely relying on readily available semantic features by suppressing a natural kind of utilitarian processing in favor of a more style-based, aesthetically conducive orientation. Specifically, Cupchik suggested that art specific training seems to provide the capacity to intentionally suppress one's natural tendency to attend only to subject matter. In doing so, experts demonstrate a more cognitive-based reaction to, and increased sensitivity towards, stylistic features (Belke, Leder, &
Augustin, 2006).
It is crucial to be able to quickly and effectively generate practical and personally relevant associations from what we visual encounter in our everyday lives as doing so helps us facilitate our needs and reach the goals we carry with us every day as we navigate the external environment. With this comes the appreciation that the vast majority of what we encounter perceptually occur through an orientation that registers what we encounter as smaller means to larger ends. Such a predisposition is cultivated out of the development of what we will refer to as an everyday visual expertise that is continually being self-reinforced by its sustained success in assisting needs and goals
89 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 across a lifespan. This type of expertise is a result of our capacity for efficiency and automaticity (Glaser & Bandai, 1999) that we commonly practice in perception and even in how our capacity for attention modulation of sensory adaptation (Gauthier, 2006; Li,
Miller, & Desimone, 1993) assist us perceptually by improving the coding of incoming visual information through a heightened sensitivity towards similarity in subsequent encounters. All of which helps facilitate faster identification which, in turn, leads us to
Hoffman’s (2000) conclusion that the dynamic of how we use past experiences to interpret incoming visual information ultimately causes us to become visual virtuosos; accomplished geniuses in vision long before we are even able to walk. As such, our inclination to approach visual encounters through a utilitarian orientation is something shaped out of the development of an everyday visual expertise that is continually being self-reinforced by its sustained success in assisting needs and goals across a lifespan.
These conclusions further bolster the proposal of a shifting perceptual orientation from one that hinders aesthetic appreciation to one that facilitates it appears to reflect an effortful means to detach oneself from the reliance on their everyday repertoire of concepts from personal experiences as a means to be more objective during the encounter. And this is what we see in expert art viewing experience where people have the awareness that they are engaging with an object that does not serve any purpose beyond its own contemplation. Such objects offer degrees of purposelessness
(Horkheimer, Adorno, & Noeri, 2002) as they provide no functional, everyday value.
These encounters are also self-sufficient in the sense that they are autonomous by possessing both the action they require from us and the desired result. The value of such encounters, then, lies entirely in their contemplation; it is whatever our imagination is
90 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 capable of reaching. Such purposeless objects meant to be contemplated for their own sake are said to be the ideal encounters for exercising our imaginative faculties (Hekkert
& Van Wierigen, 1996).
It is reasonable to argue that one of the most impactful manners we exploit the effects these purposeless encounters have on ourselves is found within the context of experiencing art—specifically contemporary art. The guiding ‘art-for-art sake' principle behind these works dictates that their experience should be an end in and of itself; that they should serve no function other than its own contemplation. Often, this intention is also accompanied by the resulting imagery being semantically challenging or misleading as a means to obstruct and distance itself from any easily reached declarative understanding; Think back, again, to Bullough's arguing for how distance can be created to appreciate this accompanying intention further. The aspirations behind the creation of such artworks is that they will be received by a contemplative viewer capable of both recognition and the ability to move past what is recognizable in order to reach a more deliberate level of objective acceptance of the artwork's self-sufficient nature found—not in its content—but how its content is presented. Again, remember painters do not become celebrated artists because of what they paint but rather how they paint it. And it is this level of appreciation that we find when expert art viewers move past the identity of the content and, instead, immerse themselves in the style-specific processing of how the content is depicted when they engage contemporary art (Augustin & Leder, 2006). But reaching such a contemplative orientation is no easy task when we mistakenly think what we encounter is supposed to have some purpose. This is especially true for our novices when what they encounter in the art viewing context resembles other objects and events
91 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 that they generally perceive as having some purpose. With this, we arrive at a resounding parallel between our empirical literature art viewing differences and our earlier philosophical rationale. This is made explicit with both Berlyne (1974) and Cupchik's
(1992, 1995, 1998) conclusions that everyday perception is utilitarian in nature which, has led to the posit that a "unique and disciplined kind of vision is needed in order to perceive physical/sensory information" (Cupchik, 1992, p.92). Additionally, most critical for the current proposal is that such a perceptual orientation is linked to contemplation and the use of higher faculties such as the imagination (Cupchik 1992;
Cupchik & Heinreichs, 1981).
We next review the related areas regarding our imaginative faculties that will eventually lead our rationale to further expound on how an expert's perceptual performance during an aesthetic encounter closely resembles how researchers have come to conceptualize good performance in divergent thinking tasks. In such tasks, we find executive control functioning as a means to suppress/inhibit the automatic activation of near associates and their resulting prepotent responses during a more active, deliberate attempt to reach farther semantic distances in the uniqueness of associations they are asked to generate. As such, it is the functioning of suppressing of near associates and their resulting prepotent responses that is proposed here as the characteristic feature that links good divergent thinking with art-viewing expertise. This ultimately brings us to consider the art-viewing differences between novices and experts as being much more nuanced than that of the acquisition of sophistication (Berliner, 1994; Clark &
Zimmerman, 1978; Glaser, 1987, 1990).
Locating our imaginative faculties in the art viewing experience
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Our imaginative faculties are said to be closely connected to both creativity and divergent thinking (Crespi, Leach, Dinsdale, Mokkonen, & Hurd, 2016) and even advocated by Eckhoff and Urbach, (2008) as the underlining catalyst behind any creative act. This notion leads us to a small corner in the aesthetics discourse to quickly review those who have argued that both the producing and experiencing of aesthetic objects require creative thinking. It is believed that the use of the imagination is as necessary for the experience of aesthetic objects as it is with the production of such objects
(CITATIONS) with Tinio (2013) explicitly claiming that the act of producing or experiencing art are not just similar but rather mirroring, imaginative acts of each other.
Additionally, curiosity is also considered intimately related to both creative thinking and the use of one’s imagination. Various researchers believe curiosity provides the drive for people to want to explore in a variety of contexts as well as condition us to anticipate reward in reaching some sense of resolution during the aesthetic engagement
(Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson, 1990; Leder et al., 2004; Markovic, 2012; Parson 1987).
In looking closer at the five stages of Csikszentmihalyi’s (2014) concept of creativity, we find that three of its stages; insight, evaluation, and elaboration as parallel stages in cognitive-based, aesthetic experience models (Leder et al., 2004; Markovic, 2012).
Finally, Vygotsky's (1930/2004) views on the imagination present our access to memories as a dichotomy where, on the one hand, we are capable of reproducing our past experiences primarily through recalling memories in an uncreative, practical manner.
And yet, on the other hand, we are just as capable of internally combining and creatively manipulating memory fragments under the guiding intentionality of generating novel
93 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 trains of thoughts and responses. In such a capacity, the imagination, according to
Vygotsky (1930/2004, p. 17) becomes;
"the means by which a person's experience is broadened because he can imagine
what he has not seen to conceptualize something from another person's narration
and description of what he, himself, has never directly experienced."
This behavior of broadening one's experience and the ability to take on another's perspective by purely internal means is how Vygotsky (1930/2004) conceptualized our capacity to self-generate meaning from that which is unknowable in the sense that such encounters offer some degree of novelty. This is a critical aspect in the conceptualization of our imaginative faculties that we will rely heavily on in establishing our perceptual approach to novel and unfamiliar encounters. This, then, helps us explain why the imaginative faculties have such a critical, central role in approaching unique forms of individual self-expression in artworks and how such faculties are a fundamental aspect of a more aesthetically conducive perceptual orientation.
Previously, the literature on art specific expertise presented us with the notion that is aesthetically conducive to shift one's perceptual orientation away from our well- practiced and strategic use of dedicated intelligence and its heavy reliance on experience to arrive at prepotent responses coming out of overly-activated near associates. Our introduction here, of the imagination, points us elsewhere in the literature to begin understanding the cognitive mechanism behind this shift away exploitatory and towards exploratory behavior. But before diving fully into our imaginative faculties, we need better appreciate how, under normal conditions, visual perception allows us to
94 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 consistently and efficiently exploit top-down information gained over years of perceptual learning. The resulting overly-activated near associates strongly assist us in navigating our everyday circumstances. As we shall see, these top-down influencers play a major role in our engagement with intrinsically ambiguous nature of all information that enters the cognitive system from an ever-changing environment. It is here that we better appreciate how our everyday visual expertise drives our predominant use of a utilitarian perceptual approach.
Visual Perception’s role in determining how exploitatory or exploratory our behavior is
For the followers of Richard Gregory's top-down proposition of perception as hypotheses (1970, 1972, 1980), the importance of exploiting already-established knowledge to serve perception is critical under the assumption that without such knowledge the results of vision would only be meaningless patterns (Gregory, 2005). The reason why such a hypothesis testing mechanism is necessary stems from the well- accepted viewpoint that incoming, sensory information is intrinsically ambiguous. This notion stretches as far back as von Helmholtz's (1867) argument that the laws of optics cause us to employ experience training and habit when interpreting sensations. And it is this extensive practice of associating sensations with objects that hinder us from being
"distinctly conscious of pure sensation" (p. 9). Helmholtz's notion that we overly- prioritize the effect generating associations rather than its cause; pure sensory experience fortuitously reaches across both ends of history within the aesthetic discourse. His words not only summons the ancient Greek's concept of aesthetics as pure sensation but also, in doing so, he provides us with an incisive rationale as to why novice art viewers struggle
95 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 to locate aesthetic value—they are just too consumed by their habit of generating immediate associations to be bothered to have an unadulterated sensory experience.
Gustav Fechner (1876/1978), also addressed the importance of top-down associative relationships resulting from the cognitive efforts to interpret sensory information. He believed the direct, bottom-up sensory impressions of such incoming information to be “relatively impoverished” (p. 115) compared to the cognitively generated associations arising from them. Here, Fechner presents incoming sensory information as intrinsically lacking useful information unless we bind some meaningful association to it (Fechner, 1876/1978 as presented in both Tinio, 2014 and Leder, 2014).
More recently, researchers conclude sensory input as being noisy and ambiguous because no unequivocal mapping exists between any piece of incoming information and one, conclusive mental representation of it as vision is forever hindered by occlusion, motion, varying illumination and changing viewpoints (Trapp & Bar, 2015). Still, others take a more definitive stance proposing that all sensory information is ambiguous, and as such, prior knowledge accumulated over time is an absolute necessity when interpreting such sensory inputs into useful information for guiding behavior (Lupyan, 2015). With this in mind, consider again the understanding that unlike semantic information, syntactic information has no well-defined, verbal processing vocabulary (Gibson, 1971) causing this information type to be impenetrably ambiguous—especially in the context of aesthetics where most of us lack this absolutely necessary experience to interpret it meaningfully (Kolers, 1973).
The predictive brain. Top-down influencers over how we handle the ambiguous nature of incoming information have been labeled collectively as the predictive brain
96 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
(Clark, 2013; Grossberg, 2013; O'Callaghan, Kveraga, Shine, Adams, & Bar, 2016) as a designation of the functional, temporal-based processes of a neural network containing, at the minimum, the prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe and cerebellum. The integrated activation of these regions is said to generate predictive neural activity that is applied to sensory information as part of attention’s role in goal-oriented behavior to reduce performance variability (Ghajar & Ivry, 2009). As such, the predictive brain helps explain how ambiguous, incoming sensory information merges with memory’s contribution in the cognitive system’s best efforts of constraining perceptual processing to maximize performance and efficiency (Witzel, Olkkonen, & Gegenfurtner, 2016).
Memory’s contribution regards the repository of stored knowledge derived from past experiences that the predictive brain exploits as a means to hone down the processing during sensory perception (O'Callaghan et al., 2016). We acquire and refine this stored knowledge base over time due to our capacity for perceptual learning which, according to Gibson (1963), constitutes a permanent change in the perception of some particular stimuli after we have repeated experiences with the stimuli. This learning mechanism, by which experience provides stored knowledge to later impacts perception is also said to demonstrate lasting changes in the perceptual system itself through such learning and, most importantly, that these changes improve our ability to respond to the world around us Goldstone's (1998). Furthermore, top-down processing additionally reinforces perceptual learning by way of associative activity responding with increased amplification to relevant, over irrelevant, features by means of previously learned associations (Murphy & Honey, 2016). This occurs through perceptual learning's guidance to prioritize relevant information with attentional weighting found at various
97 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 processing stages (Archambault, O'Donnell, & Schyns, 1999; Eckstein, Abbey, Pham, &
Shimozaki, 2004; Goldstone, 1998). Finally, the overarching importance that experience—by way of perceptual learning—has on our meaning-making processes is reflected in findings such effects as far back as early visual processing where practice leads to performance improvements in visual discrimination tasks even at the level of individual neurons outperforming their competition in V1 (Ghose, Yang, & Maunsell,
2002). This outperforming at the neuronal level— concerning the automaticity aspect of the cognitive system—relies on content that rises above within a competitive neural environment. The neurons that are the most overly-activated are the ones that get the recognized as making progress in the task performance.
All of this brings us to the conclusion that the seemingly ubiquitous use of perceptual learning establishes experience's top-down impact as the single most defining factor for two key aspects of our utilitarian perceptual approach. First, in determining what is and is not deemed relevant when extracting information from the environment— by way of perceptual learning across time—and second, towards what information is deemed relevant to elaborate on during the meaning-making aspects of visual processing.
All of this, again, reminds us of Roger Fry's (1937) thoughts regarding the demands of everyday life being so persistent that they cause our sense of vision to become specialized to keep up with these demands.
Today we can easily relate Fry’s theoretical notions align well with our current conception of perceptual learning and how it operates in conjunction with visual perception’s efforts to function through efficiency under the overarching guidance of the cognitive system’s processing limitations (Barlow & Reeves, 1979; Forster & Lavie,
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2009; Green & Bavelier, 2003; Lavie & Cox,1997; Lavie, Hirst, De Fockert, & Viding,
2004; Lavie & Russell, 2003; Nussenbaum, Amso, & Markant, 2017). In fact, it is the coupling of perceptual learning with such a need for efficiency that, again, led to
Hoffman (2000) earlier conclusions that the efficiency by which our visual perception functions is enough justification to label us as “geniuses at vision” (p. 12) even before we’re capable of walking.
Cognitive penetration. A more nuanced concept regarding memory's contribution to the interpretation of sensory information comes from considering memory's role in facilitating object identification (O'Callaghan, Kveraga, Shine, Adams,
& Bar, 2017). This, again, aligns nicely with Gregory's (1997) notion of perceptions as hypotheses which is said to originate out of learning visual feature-based associations used to generate implicit predictions that act as the initial cognitive component penetrating back into the stream of sensory information processing (Gregory, 1997). This splicing of internally sourced information with the incoming sensory information is proposed to exploit such implicit predictions as a means to generate perceptual inferences from ambiguous sensory information by sharpening early representations within the visual system's processing (Kok, Jehee, & De Lange (2012). This sharpening is likely connected to the selectivity of specific visual features as Gibert, and Li (2013) demonstrated that expectations for objects, based on specific visual features, are capable of providing filters for such features. This last finding not only supports top-down processes having an impact on object recognition but also that there is a transfer of perceptual learning between distinct objects that share visual features (Gibert & Li, 2013;
Gölcü & Gibert, 2009).
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More specifically, it is argued that visual perception is not cognitively penetrable for roughly the first 100 milliseconds after exposure (Cecchi, 2014) thus, placing the origins of cognitive penetration’s feedback into the ongoing processing stream as occurring sometime after this point. But, for perception to be penetrable after this 100 ms point, the partial processing of sensory information to be later applied as the source necessary to begin activating memory’s retrieval of basic, categorical details (Curran,
Tanaka, & Weiskopf, 2002; Fabre-Thorpe, Delorme, Marlot, & Thorpe, 2001) must occur somewhere within this first 100 ms. timeframe (Kveraga, Ghuman, & Bar, 2007).
This early activation of memory structures will be addressed in detail shortly with our second conceptualization of the predictive brain. But, for now, it is this initial activation and retrieval of basic category-based predictions from memory that ultimately gets recruited in the system's efforts towards identification (Bar, 2003; Oliva & Torralba,
2007) when they are spliced back into the hierarchy of the visual system’s processing stream around the 100-120 millisecond point. It is here where this splicing/coalescing of externally-sourced, sensory information with internally-generated, predictions that we find a constraining/narrowing of potential interpretations (Kveraga, Ghuman, & Bar,
2007). Plus, it is this splicing/coalescing of sensory information with useful, behavior- guiding, internally-sourced information that leads to faster object recognition
(O’Callaghan, Kveraga, Shine, Adams, & Bar, 2017).
The proactive brain. Our second conceptualization regarding the brain’s predictive nature during visual perception comes out of a decade of incremental investigations (Bar, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2011; Bar & Bubic, 2013; Tal & Bar, 2014). Its approach to understanding the predictive component during the identification of an object
100 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 has blossomed out of earlier predictive theories of iterative cortical processing involving both feedforward and feedback connections (Bar, 2003; Friston, 2005; Mumford, 1992;
Rao & Ballard, 1999; Ullman, 1995). Additionally, Bar’s model provides much more functional detail than those attempting to develop the cognitive penetrations framework.
The model begins by shifting the question of object recognition from ‘what it is' to ‘what is it similar to.' Its predictive process begins with a side-car copy of the object's incoming information subjected to a rapidly applied, low-pass filter early in the ventral, visual pathway that results in only the object's gist-based information. These coarse outlines and basic object contours are extracted from the processing stream and shuttled quickly forward to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) by way of the magnocellular pathway
(Bar, 2007, 2009, 2011). This pathway appears to be ideal for passing such global feature information at higher speeds than its parvocellular counterpart (Merigan & Maunsell,
1993: Tootell, Silverman, Hamilton, Switkes, & De Valois, 1988).
These rapid forward projections of global information initiate the OFC to generate quick predictions by activating pre-existing memory-based representations that most resemble these blurred versions of the object. The generation of these predictions offers multiple options based on similarities of the object's general visual gist to that of any pre- existing knowledge of other objects that might share these global features—if represented in a "blurred or decontextualized" manner (Bar & Bubic, 2013, p.64). For example; attending only to a blurred image of a handgun without any other contextual information might activate a quick retrieval of a blurred hairdryer and a blurred hand drill as well as any other object that broadly resembles a handgun based on some shared, categorical, and general visual familiarity (Tal & Bar, 2014). We can understand these two options as
101 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 being associates of the blurred handgun simply based on the sensory presentation of the three sharing a similar global shape.
What is then proposed to follow (Bar, 2007, 2009, 2011; Bar & Bubic, 2013) is that these predictions are, again, quickly shuttled back into the ongoing, slower processing stream of the inferior temporal cortex to be incorporated into the handling of the finer grain, visual properties of the object (Bar et al., 2001; 2006). The consolidating of these potential options back into the ongoing, slower processing helps to further facilitate object recognition by narrowing the processing down to bias the primed routes of these early predictions (the hairdryer and drill in the above example). These, then, are prioritized to be tested first against the slower processing efforts to retrieve a matching object from memory by which to initiate the lexical identifying of the current object (Tal
& Bar, 2014). All of this is done in the service of reducing the time and resource demand on the system by discarding other potential processing routes that are not among those provided by the feedback predictions (Bar, 2009, 2011; Bar & Bubic, 2013; Tal & Bar,
2014). In a broad sense, our take away here is to appreciate that both the cognitive penetration and proactive brain arguments point to a larger system's prevailing need to narrow down its processing of incoming information to provide faster, more efficient object recognition.
The key here is that this narrowing comes not in the early, global (predictive) aspect but rather in the following local, refining aspect that occurs in the actual, rear brain's, visual processing. With this in mind, it is reasonable to argue that such activity reflects our predisposition to quickly and efficiently exploit already-established knowledge as a means to narrow down the processing required to arrive at a definitive,
102 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 single response. The key argument here is that doing so is antithetical to the exploratory behavior of contemplation. We will address this further in later sections regarding the overall cognitive system's capacity, under certain conditions, to intentionally suppress this narrowing processing when the overactivation of immediately available, near associates are deemed irrelevant when the brain registers itself reaching a cognitive impasse in its utilitarian approach. But for now, it is worth noting that the cognitive penetration and, especially, the proactive brain frameworks suggest a form of exploratory behavior followed by an exploitatory behavior which, as we are about to see, closely resembles how others generally conceptualize creativity.
As such, we move forward under the following assumption; that the result of our predisposed utilitarian perceptual orientation during visual perception is exploitatory in its efforts to arrive at a singular conclusion. This leads to an especially thought-provoking hypothetical if we pause to reconsider Bar's identification task and ponder what would happen if it were to occur exclusively in a "blurred or decontextualized" context (Bar &
Bubic, 2013, p.64) without the availability of additional, narrowing-down processing of subsequent, local/detailed visual features. This hypothetical begs the question that drives the entirety of the current project's methodology; What if these blurred/low-pass filtered predictions are all information available to the cognitive system? What if there was no additional processing of finer details to refine these multiple options further? Could placing visual perception in such a condition bring about a temporary mindset that necessitates a shift back from exploitatory to exploratory behavior as the most appropriate approach to generating meaning of whatever is visually presented? To further understand this possibility, we need to unpack certain conditions regarding exploratory
103 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 behavior and their ties to creativity. This will ultimately lead us to better define why, when and how we consciously apply our imaginative faculties in the effort to contemplate, rather than understand, what we encounter. And, in doing so, we begin to build our bridge back to the ancient Greeks and their original notion of aesthetics.
Creative thinking
It was established that automaticity assists the narrowing down aspect of visual processing that necessarily provides a degree of immediacy in the associative processes as a means to facilitate fast, efficient object recognition. This, then, brings us to consider a possible dichotomy. One between this systematic and superficial approach's exploitation of already established knowledge by prioritizing the of overly-activated and immediately accessible near associates and the opposing, occasional need to engage a more exploratory approach in the effort to generate remote associates during encounters when the already established knowledge coming from these near associates demonstrate itself to be useless/irrelevant. To fully develop this contrast, we look next to the characteristically unsystematic approach of using improvisational intelligence and cognitive flexibility to generate potentially useful options. This exploratory behavior, as we will address, occurs exclusively through an internally-directed attention. With this, we will also find an active intentionality in the use of our imaginative faculties and their improvisational intelligence that allows us to inhibit near associates as we attempt to reach out farther to potentially useful, more individualized interpretations. To begin building this case, we start with creative thinking and work our way to executive control and how there is a critical interaction between applying such control and associative processing during creative thinking (Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek, 2014).
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Additionally, we look at how this interaction goes against the automaticity and narrowing aspects involved in the predictive brain’s drive towards recognition based on similarity.
Models in creative thinking. There are two, seemingly contradictory but complementary, conceptions of creative thinking. The associative theory supports aspects regarding the spontaneous generation of creative ideas pulled from the farther reaches of semantic memory (Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek, 2014; Bowden, Jung-
Beeman, Fleck, & Kounios, 2005; Mednick, 1962). The controlled-attention theory posits that creative ideas are a result of top-down control over attentional focus and its resulting cognitions (Beaty & Silvia, 2012, 2013; Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony & Wynn, 2007).
Both theories help establish necessary aspects of creativity’s essential relationship with semantic memory (Abraham, 2014; Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek, 2014;
Kenett, Anaki, & Faust, 2014; Ward, 2008).
To start, it is necessary to view creativity’s generative aspect as representing the creation of ideas that are potentially both novel and useful (Götz, 1981; Mayer, 1999;
Runco, & Jaeger, 2012). This allows us to define creativity itself as a collective construct of two distinct processes; the generation of multiple novel options followed by some subsequent assessment of the usefulness of such options to narrow them down to a singular, most relevant choice in any given situation (Barron, 1955; Cummings &
Oldham, 1997; Hoever, Van Knippenberg, Van Ginkel, & Barkema, 2012; Nijstad, De
Dreu, Rietzschel, & Baas, 2010; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). With this in mind, the narrowing aspect seems to suggest some needed degree of control in being able to partition irrelevant from relevant information which, in turn, will bring us shortly to understanding the role of executive control in creativity.
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This collective construct understanding of creativity runs parallel to those who consider it as the outcome of both divergent and convergent thinking (Brophy, 1998;
Jung, Mead, Carrasco, & Flores, 2013). This rationale also seamlessly aligns with
Campbell’s (1960) Blind Variation and Selective Retention (BVSR) model of creativity where the initial blind variation aspect refers to the generating and testing of ideas where the usefulness of such ideas is not fully known. Blind variation, here, is not a reference to visual blindness but rather, to the level of difficulty with or lacking the capacity to anticipate the usefulness of the information contained within an unfamiliar/novel encounter (Campbell, 1960, Simonton, 2013). Specifically, the information's relevancy to reaching some degree of resolution in any given situation. Under Campbell's model, generating blind variations would be a necessary aspect for navigating or resolving problems ranging from partially unfamiliar to never before encountered. His subsequent, selective retention component, on the other hand, closely resembles convergent thinking
(Jung et al., 2013) which, refines such blind options down to a single, best-suited response (Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011) that is register as the most relevant choice in any given situation.
The initial blind variation component of Campbell’s creativity is of particular significance to the current project. It resembles the unsystematic approach to resolve conflict in Perkin's (2000) unreasonable problem space and our characteristically unsystematic approach of improvisational intelligence as an adaptive cognitive mechanism. Perkin's logic regarding unreasonable problems is said to be intentionally applied when the exploitation of dedicated intelligence cannot quickly and successfully
106 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 anticipate an encounter's usefulness (Jung, 2014). We can take this as another articulation of the adaptive nature of Campbell's blind variations.
When considering events that can be operationalized to represent unreasonable problem spaces, we will look to the unusual uses task as the nature of the task is to ask people to generate non-common, unique uses for everyday objects. This task is a central feature of divergent thinking studies as it allows researchers to investigate the generating of remote associates. These farther, more deliberate associates are argued to be the best representative means to reflect semantic distance in associative activity and thus act as a quantifiable proxy to reflect our use of imaginative faculties under such conditions when a cognitively demanding task takes the form of an unreasonable problem. Finally, in reviewing divergent thinking—and more specifically the necessary executive control we soon related to it—we will come to have a more nuanced understanding of how creative thinking and the use of one’s imagination lies at the core in the novice/expert art viewing distinction.
Divergent thinking. Researchers believe divergent thinking currently represents our best means to measure creative thinking (Silvia et al., 2008). The origin of this logic is found in Christensen, Guilford, & Wilson, 1957) initial claim that DT facilitates the more spontaneous generation of remote associates. These associates are believed to be applied as novel and potentially useful alternatives (Guilford, 1957; Nusbaum & Silvia,
2011; Wilson, Guilford, & Christensen, 1953) when given a non-standard or unfamiliar problem such as an unusual uses task that lacks a knowable systematic approach to reaching a single, definitive solution. And under such non-standard or unfamiliar conditions, we begin to grasp how and why the generative half of creativity and the
107 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 improvisational mechanisms behind it have come to be considered a necessary, adaptive aspect of our overall capacity for problem-solving (Jung, 2014; Simonton, 2013). The theoretical foundation being established is additionally supported by the conclusion that our imaginative faculties are measured exclusively through divergent thinking tasks
(Jung, 2014) which also bolsters the logic of why tests of divergent thinking are the most frequently used assessment tool for creativity and creative potential (Acar & Runco,
2014). Finally, to bring this back to aesthetics, we will need to incorporate all of this logic into the context of Nusbaum and Silivia’s (2011) proposal that executive control is a key, central facet to creative thinking and furthermore, how such executive processes interact with associative processes to play a crucial role in creative thinking (Beaty,
Silvia, Nusbaum & Jauk, 2014).
For our purposes, there are three central aspects of DT that need to be addressed.
First being the serial order effect and its reflects spreading activation from near to remote associates across time. Second is how success in divergent thinking directly relates to one’s capacity for resistance to premature closure which also reinforces the theory of spreading activation. Finally, we introduce the importance of executive control during divergent thinking and how it relates to the serial order effect and resistance to premature closure.
It was Christensen et al., (1957) who first operationalized measures for generating remote associates—later to become central in divergent thinking tests—as well as the first demonstration of the serial order effect (Christensen et al., 1957; Parnes, 1961; Ward
1969) The effect’s unusual robustness (Beaty & Silvia, 2012) is consistently reflected in researching showing generated ideas becoming increasingly remote and more
108 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 original/unique across time (Christensen et al., 1957; Parnes, 1961; Ward 1969; Phillip &
Torrance 1977; Milgram & Rabkin, 1980; Runco, 1986; Johns, Morse, & Morse 2001).
The cause of this is argued to be the spreading of neural activation that moves past near associates and their resulting prepotent responses and towards more remote associates and their resulting more unique responses (Mednick, 1962). Evidence supporting the serial order effect eventually led researchers to widely accept that the degree of originality in participants’ responses is the result of activation spreading across both time and semantic memory (Sio, Monaghan, & Ormerod, 2013; Sio, & Rudowicz, 2007;
Smith, 1995; Yaniv & Meyer, 1987). This understanding has become a central aspect to the established framework of our current understanding of how associative processes broadly function (Collins, & Loftus, 1975; Balota, & Lorch, 1986; Sio, Monaghan, &
Ormerod, 2013; Anderson, & Bower, 2014). Furthermore, it is the foundation to which the associative theory of creativity posits how the spontaneous generation of creative ideas consumes more time as they are pulled from the farther reaches of semantic memory (Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek, 2014; Bowden, Jung-Beeman, Fleck
& Kounios, 2005; Mednick, 1962).
Support for the outward spreading of activation is also inferred from divergent thinking related measures including flexibility, originality and a resistance to premature closure (Kim, 2006A; 2006A; Moore et al., 2009). Specifically, findings show divergent thinking—as reflected in higher scores on these three measures—takes longer than convergent thinking (Benedek, Bergner, Könen, Fink, & Neubauer, 2011) which is believed to also align with findings elsewhere showing the generating of remote associations also take longer than near associations (Gruszka, & Necka, 2002).
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Specifically, resistance to premature closure regards the capacity to keep one’s mind open and flexible longer to allow for larger associative leaps rather than to prematurely settle on a single, definitive conclusion sourced from an overly-activated, near associate (Kim, 2006A; Kim, 2017). This resistance can be understood as a sort of preventative measure to avoid reaching only hasty conclusions (Torrance, 1992). In the context of creative thinking, premature closures—reaching only hasty conclusions—is arguably something to be avoided (Runco, 2015). This notion of avoidance implies some degree of higher order, active suppression/inhibition which brings us to the role of executive control in the generative aspect of creativity.
Having to perform an unusual uses task for familiar, everyday objects is believed to require some degree of higher-order inhibition that actively attempts to suppress salient and newly-irrelevant, near associates that would facilitate fast, prepotent responses of common uses (Beaty & Silvia, 2012). This, of course, brings about the contention—to be addressed shortly—of defining what is relevant as opposed to irrelevant information in the topsy-turvy condition of being asked to respond in an unreasonable manner, i.e., coming up with unusual uses for everyday objects.
For now, irrespective of relevance, consider the fan effect (Anderson, 1974) in such a context where prepotent responses are undesirable. The fan effect shows that the more details we learn about a specific concept, the more difficult it is to retrieve any one of those particular details due to the increasing competition of co-activation between a growing number of details. If we follow the logic that increasing co-activation also increases competition, then the fan effect appears to be problematic not just for recalling any specific, easily associable detail but more so if such competition also represents
110 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 increased interference when the desired outcome is something more unique and less competitive than that of the easily associable details. If near associates have to compete with each other, then remote associates would—according to the fan effect logic—have an even harder time being accessible.
The foundation being established also supports a widely accepted position that near associates more representative of common responses while more semantically distanced, remote associates are justifiable proxies for measuring the originality of responses (Guilford, 1957; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011; Wilson, Guilford, & Christensen,
1953). In many ways, we can extrapolate that the details we learn about any given object or concept come to define a self-imposed box of competing associates based on the level of easy of their activation; the activation of these various associates can be influential by constricting our thoughts on the matter to only those whose activation outperforms the rest. Hence, we have the creative industry’s affinity for the phrase“think outside of the box.” And, this cliché is useful to appreciate that we do possess a cultural awareness of our predisposition that—at times—can rely too heavily on overly activated associates.
But this phrase also reflects that we are also capable of demonstrating certain adaptive, cognitive approaches to consciously overcome these circumstances during the infrequent occasions when we are explicitly asked to respond in an imaginative manner such as that of an unusual uses task in a divergent thinking study.
It is here, with the notion of thinking outside the box that we find central executive processes being a crucial mechanism for interference management (Beaty &
Silvia, 2012; Bexkens, Van der Molen, Collot d'Escury-Koenigs, & Huizenga, 2014;
Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011; Unsworth, 2010). Rather than understanding it just as
111 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 resistance to premature closure, interference management allows for a more nuanced appreciation; that to create unusual use responses, one needs to control the distracting and possibly obstructing influence of overly-activated and readily accessible associations triggered by an object's salient features.
Higher order strategies such as mental set switching (Arbuthnott & Frank, 2000A;
Arbuthnott, & Frank, 2000A) begins to shed light on our capacity to control our associative processes. Mental set switching occurs across time and reflects a rising awareness of reaching a cognitive impasse or conflict that eventually motivates a conscious switching between pre-existing knowledge categories (Troyer, Moscovitch, &
Winocur 1997; Unsworth, Spiller, & Brewer, 2011). We can see this as an initial attempt to overcome the impasse or conflict while still operating within a systematic effort to exploit an overall, pre-existing, knowledge base. More to the point, it has also been shown, across time, that executive control plays a role in shifting cognitive strategies from such exploitatory, memory-retrieval approaches during an unusual uses task and towards a more exploratory, abstract approach of mentally disassembling a cued everyday object in order to reconsider its individual parts (Gilhooly et al., 2007). Doing so has been reported to produce changes in responses from being mundane and obvious uses to more creative uses. These findings even capture participants demonstrating the capacity to recognize when their exploitatory strategies are ineffectual during their efforts in generating unusual uses (Gilhooly et al., 2007; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011).
Interference management, then, points to a temporal component of increasing awareness of one having to reconcile an impasse or conflict when attempting to engaging unfamiliar aspects of otherwise everyday encounters. This awareness seems to occur in
112 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 conjunction with the serial order effect where more salient features generate more prepotent responses in people's earlier, more systematic efforts. At some point, the impasse or conflict brings about a certain level of awareness. Here, executive control is called upon to enact interference management that allows for less obvious features to begin to provide more unusual and unique responses further down the timeline (Nusbaum
& Silvia, 2011; Beaty & Silvia, 2012; Benedek, Franz, Heene & Neubauer, 2012;
Benedek, Jauk, Sommer, Arendasy & Neubauer, 2014).
Being asked to respond in a counter-intuitive manner such as that found in the unusual uses task of everyday objects brings about the necessity to consciously suppress the over-activation of salient interference (Gilhooly et al., 2007; Nusbaum & Silvia,
2011; Silvia, 2011). Such deliberate suppression of salient knowledge (Bunting, Conway,
& Heitz 2004; Friedman & Miyake, 2004; May, Hasher & Kane, 1999) is also found with the Remote Associate Test where inferior performance is reflected in consistently responding with only near semantic associates. Superior performance, conversely, reflects the capacity to intentionally suppress these near associates as a means to reach out to farther to remote associates (Beaty & Silvia, 2012; Gupta, Jang, Mednick, &
Huber, 2012). Now, recall the evidence showing that experts art viewers are capable of shifting their processing away from semantic information and towards syntactic information (Belke, Leder, & Augustin, 2006; Cupchik & Gebotys, 1988; Cupchik,
Vartanian, Crawley, & Mikulis, 2009; Cupchik & Winston, 1996; Cupchik, Winston, &
Herz, 1992; Winston & Cupchik, 1992). It is posited here that this conscious suppressing of over-activated salient interference demonstrated in studies investigating the generating of remote associates as proxies to more original ideas is the exact cognitive dynamic
113 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 occurring in art viewing experts and absent in art viewing novices. To establish the reasoning for this claim, we first need to go further to understand better how the use of executive control under the conditions of an unreasonable problem space as a major component in our attentional focus and how executive control reflects the larger cognitive system's efforts to self-correct or self-adjust its attentional focus in real-time.
We can posit these last points based on the interference management and strategy shifting conclusions of others suggesting that overall cognitive system has the capacity of awareness of when its already stored knowledge regarding any given topic or situation can, at times, act as its own obstruction in its processing efforts. Doing so helps contextualize the rationale behind Both Nusbaum and Silivia’s (2011) proposal that executive control is a key, central facet to creative thinking as well as the combined importance executive and associative processes are said to have in creative thinking
(Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, & Jauk, 2014). But, more than anything, it is the system's willingness to accept and engage improvisational mechanisms that executive control allows for under such difficult conditions that reflect the larger system's awareness/appreciation of its adaptive nature.
Divergent thinking’s relationship with the Default mode network. The importance of executive control processes in divergent thinking has also found support in neuroimaging, i.e., fMRI and electroencephalogram (EEG) research looking into the default mode network (DMN). There is a growing interest in exploring the connection between divergent thinking and resting state activity of the DMN as such activity has close ties with the generation of internally-sourced, spontaneous cognitions (Beaty et al.,
2014). Creativity researchers have also come to consider the likelihood that DMN
114 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 activity may be the driving force behind Campbell’s (1960) blind-variation and selective- retention processes (Jung et al., 2013). Finally, DMN activity has also been directly associated with various aspects of creativity including more imaginative thinking
(Smallwood et al., 2016), spontaneous, self-generated content (Blakemore, Rees, & Frith,
1998; Passingham, Bengtsson, & Lau, 2010), and even free exploration in virtual environments (Maguire, Frith, Burgess, Donnett, & O'keefe, 1998). As such, it is taken here that default mode activity is likely, intrinsically connected to creative thinking and its precursor; the use of imaginative faculties.
Here, the use of the label ‘resting state' for DMN activity can be a misnomer of sorts in that this state should not be taken to mean a deficit or absence of coordinated neural activity. While the brain only constitutes 2% of the body's total mass, it also represents ~20% of the body's total metabolic activity during such resting states (Fox &
Greicius, 2010). Furthermore, this level of metabolic activity is substantial in the context that there is only an additional ~5% increase in the brain's metabolic activity after it transitions out of a resting state with the onset of some externally-sourced, cognitively demanding task (Raichle & Mintun, 2006). It was exactly this substantial nature of the
DMN's metabolic activity that originally caught the attention of Raichle et al. (2001) whom would ultimately codify this as representing a network of highly synchronized regions. What he found was that the hippocampal formation, the medial prefrontal cortex
(mPFC), posterior cingulate (PCC) and inferior parietal cortices (IPL) (Crespi, Leach,
Dinsdale, Mokkonen, & Hurd, 2016; Raichle et al., 2001) as well as the precuneus
(Fransson & Marrelec, 2008; Garrity et al., 2007; Utevsky, Smith & Huettel, 2014) all show exceptional convergence in their activity during resting state recordings between
115 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 externally-directed task trials. This assembly of brain regions lying mostly along the brain’s midline has, since, been further demonstrated to reflect extraordinarily consistent, networked activity during periods of internally-directed attention and its resulting stimulus-independent thought (De Pasquale & Marzetti, 2014; Harrison et al., 2008;
Whitfield-Gabrieli & Ford 2012; Yan et al., 2009). Such conclusions are further bolstered by others demonstrating this network’s activity as being detrimental to performance during externally-directed, cognitively demanding tasks as well as reflected in findings showing lower levels of DMN activity in conjunction with better performance on such externally-directed tasks (Daselaar et al., 2004, 2009; Whitfield-Gabrieli & Ford 2012).
And still elsewhere, as such tasks become more cognitively demanding, DMN activation has been shown to be further suppressed (Eichele et al., 2008; Gould, Brown, Owen,
Bullmore, & Howard, 2006; Jansma, Ramsey, Zwart, van Gelderen, & Duyn 2007;
McKiernan, Kaufman, Kucera-Thompson, & Binder, 2003; Singh & Fawcett, 2008).
The reason DMN activity associates with poorer externally-directed task performance comes from what is believed to be the DMN preoccupation with internally- sourced/self-generated content that centers around self-referential thoughts. Specifically, these domains include the network's fixation on autobiographical and other episodic memories (Gusnard, Akbudak, Shulman, & Raichle, 2001; Sheline et al., 2009; Spreng &
Grady, 2010), prospection (Spreng, Mar, & Kim, 2009) as well as the mental construction of novel scenarios (Fransson & Marrelec, 2008). More importantly for the current project is the strong association DMN activity has with internally-sourced content coming from mind wandering and daydreaming (Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, & Schooler,
2009; Gilbert, Dumontheil, Simons, Frith, & Burgess, 2007; Killingsworth & Gilbert,
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2010; Brewer et al., 2011; Kucyi, Salomons, & Davis, 2013). And most specifically to the upcoming methodology is the DMN’s role in the generation of spontaneous cognitions (Andrews-Hanna, Reidler, Huang, & Buckner, 2010) that is also commonly associated with mind wandering and daydreaming (Smallwood & Andrews‐Hanna, 2013;
Smallwood, Brown, Baird, & Schooler, 2012; Smallwood et al., 2016). This relationship between resting state activity and spontaneous cognitions has additionally been posited to being advantageous to creative thinking (Christoff, Gordon, Smith, & Vancouver, 2011) and further supported by finding demonstrating spontaneous cognitions as a critical aspect of encoding and retrieving of more remote semantic information (Andreasen et al.,
1995; Binder et al., 1999; Christoff, Ream, & Gabrieli, 2004; Stark & Squire, 2001).
This brings us to the unique relationship the DMN has with divergent thinking.
On a comparative level, people with stronger default mode connectivity have been shown to perform better on internally-directed attention measures of cognitive ability such as reading comprehension, memory and divergent thinking (Li et al., 2009; Song et al.,
2009; van den Heuvel, Stam, Kahn, & Pol, 2009; Wig et al., 2008). But even more importantly, a temporal connectivity analysis conducted by Beaty et al., (2015) of participants during divergent thinking tasks shows a distinct sequence of events that gives some useful insight into our understanding of how associative activation spreads from near to remote associates. Here, the initiation of a divergent thinking task showed increased connectivity between key DMN regions and the salience network (SN) (Beaty,
Benedek, Kaufman, & Silvia, 2015). The SN consists of the anterior insula (AI) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and is essential for monitoring the salience of external inputs (Bressler & Menon, 2010). But, at later stages of the divergent thinking
117 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 task, this connectivity with the SN was replaced by increased connectivity with the dorsolateral PFC (Beaty et al., 2015) and thus further supporting the previous claims regarding the latter engagement of executive control in such task when a conflict rises to the level of an impasse. This sequence of shifting connectivity could arguably be implicated in how the active, executive control of suppressing near associates functions in conjunction with the serial order effect by helping to prevent externally-sourced salient features from disrupting the more internally-directed and time-consuming associative activity of reaching farther semantic distances.
All of this supports the conclusions elsewhere that a robust, cooperative interaction exists between the DMN and executive control systems when regulating aspects of internally directed attention (Andrews‐Hanna, Smallwood, & Spreng, 2014;
Beaty et al.,2015). It is this exact cooperation that is argued to be precisely what allows for creative ideas to be generated in the first place (Beaty et al., 2015). And taken as a whole, all of this further bolsters our current discussion regarding our capacity to shift away from an externally-oriented, goal-directed task to a more free-form inward-looking orientation detached from external stimuli. As such, the connection between the DMN and divergent thinking helps provide empirical credence to our writers from philosophical aesthetics and their notions of being disinterested, distanced and detached from our everyday world as being conducive to engaging things with a more contemplative and aesthetically conducive mindset.
Extending the DT/DMN relationship to include alpha band activity. Next, we review various findings from the EEG literature that not only further demonstrates the consistent links between DMN/DT but also introduces the role alpha band activity has in
118 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 this dynamic. Much of this reinforcement comes from the findings of EEG research explicitly looking at the involvement of alpha power with elements related to creative thinking in both global scalp as well as more localized recording data.
Alpha power or overall alpha activity reflects the number of neurons oscillating synchronously in the alpha frequency range (Klimesch, Sauseng, & Hanslmayr, 2007;
Mo, Liu, Huang, & Ding, 2013; Pfurtscheller, 2001) as recorded by electrodes placed on the scalp. More specifically, event-related desynchronization (ERD) reflects the degree to which an event or task causes neurons to decrease oscillating synchronously in the alpha frequency range with respect to a pre-stimuli baseline level of alpha activity often referred to as a reference period or interval. As such, ERD is understood to represents a quantifiable decrease in alpha power and commonly used as a way to assess a task or event’s impact at the neural level. Heightened levels of alpha activity, also called event- related synchronization (ERS), on the other hand, reflect the degree to which an event or task causes neurons to increase oscillating synchronously. ERS (i.e., increased alpha power in comparison to the reference baseline) was initially understood to reflect idle/resting processing (Adrian & Matthews 1934; Lehtonen, & Lehtinen, 1972;
Pfurtscheller, 2001). These conclusions were based on work showing higher alpha activity being recording during periods when the eyes are closed while such activity is attenuated when the eyes are opened (Adrian & Matthews, 1934; Berger, 1929) but will remain higher if the eyes are opened in the dark (Adrian & Matthews, 1934).
Underlining why DMN, DT, and alpha activity are related is the fact that they all must function under the same constraint of on one of cognitive science’s core principles; the brain’s limited processing capacity. This, again, produces the necessity for filtering
119 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 out unwanted information. As such, object and events in the environment must compete for our attention (Desimone & Duncan, 1995). The simultaneous processing of both external and internal information has, under various, cognitively demanding conditions, been shown to be detrimental to the performance of one if not both domains (Chun et al.,
2011; Dixon et al., 2014). Examples of this negative impact of an internally-directed attention on an externally-demanding task speaks specifically to increased DMN activity
(Daselaar, Prince, & Cabeza, 2004; Daselaar et al., 2009; Eichele et al., 2008; Singh &
Fawcett, 2008; Whitfield-Gabrieli & Ford, 2012) and mind wandering (Smallwood et al.,
2016) associated with an internally-directed attention.
The opposite holds true as well. A frontal-parietal control network protects an internally directed attention from the constant bombardment of interference coming in from the environment (Smallwood, Brown, Baird, & Schooler, 2012). Here, aspects related to the DMN is believed to be the facilitating force behind stimulus-independent thought i.e., self-generated content (McGuire, Paulesu, Frackowiak, & Frith, 1996;
Spreng & Grady, 2010) as well as also facilitating the generation of spontaneous cognitions (Andrews-Hanna, Reidler, Huang, & Buckner, 2010). The resulting perceptual decoupling that accompanies DMN activity is crucial for internally-directed attention because the ability to maintain a coherent, internal train of thought necessarily frees us from having to immediately respond to every perceptually registered event that occurs in front of us (Smallwood, Brown, Baird, & Schooler, 2012).
Beyond the association with resting/idle brain states, we find increased alpha activity in a growing literature that places it as a key, top-down component in the suppression/inhibition of information that has the potential of acting as unwanted
120 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 interference. Some findings broadly posit that alpha activity serves as a control mechanism for the flow of information by inhibiting the processing of task-irrelevant information (Busch & Herrmann, 2003; Cooper et al., 2003; Herrmann et al., 2004;
Jensen & Mazahari, 2010; Jensen et al., 2002; Klimesch, Sauseng, & Hanslmayr, 2007;
Sauseng et al., 2005, 2009). To this end, self-generated content, sourced from an internally directed attention, is said to involve a specific state of mind where attention is decoupled from being preoccupied with external stimuli (Frith & Frith, 2006; Raichle,
2010; Smallwood, 2013).
It appears that such a specific state of mind, or inwardly directed orientation, is further supported by increased alpha activity across visual processing systems. Support for this comes from more nuanced studies with specific findings linking higher levels of alpha activity in the posterior brain with the suppression of external visual information processing (Benedek, Bergner, Könen, Fink, & Neubauer, 2011; Benedek, Schickel,
Jauk, Fink, & Neubauer, 2014; Fink & Benedek, 2013). Elsewhere, such increased alpha activity across the visual cortex is argued to reflect a distinct processing mode that controls the flow of information to facilitate better access to retrieving semantic information under specific conditions where external stimuli are deemed irrelevant
(Klimesch, Fellinger, & Freunberger, 2011).
Aspects of this can even be extended to eye behavior shown to be both responsive as well as supportive of internally directed attention’s creation of self-generated content by also suppressing the potentially distracting influence of incoming sensory information
(Walcher, Körner, & Benedek, 2017). Generally, alpha activity is higher in temporo- occipital as well as fronto-parietal regions during eyes closed conditions (Legewie,
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Simonova, & Creutzfeldt, 1969) Similar results recorded over parieto-occipital areas leading researchers to conclude that the opening of the eyes suppresses alpha activity in visual areas and, thus, allowing for better visual processing (Salenius, 1995). Conversely, and more relevant to the current project is how placing participants within a uniform, diffused visual field with their eyes opened increased alpha activity across the occipital scalp nearly back to their initially higher recording levels during eyes closed conditions
(Lehtonen, & Lehtinen, 1972). The diffused visual field, in this case, was a circular, semi-opaque dome large enough to be placed over participants' heads while still allowing free movement of the head but also preventing visual fixation and the resulting explicit recognizability of any objects within the room. What was actually extracted from the visual field was the capacity for local feature processing of visual content. This, then, leads us to the importance of saliency.
Generally, eye closure has also been shown to be beneficial for memory as well as mental visualization (Vredeveldt, Hitch, & Baddeley, 2011). Averting direct eye-to-eye contact with someone else during internally-directed cognitive tasks supports visual- spatial imagination presumably due to both disengaging with task-irrelevant visual information as well as reducing one’s cognitive load by not having to register the salient information of someone’s face or the subsequent social interaction processes that would habitually follow (Markson & Paterson, 2009; Buchanan, et al., 2014).
Other oculomotor mechanisms such as dis-accommodation additionally support a cognitive system's efforts to avoid salient, visual information. Accommodation here refers to focusing on some external object at various spatial distances and how this requires various angular alignments of the eyes for different distances. This eye
122 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 convergence is how we adjust for distance in our efforts to bring visual content into sharp focus. (Delank & Gehlen, 2006; McLin & Schor, 1988; Myers & Stark, 1990).
Defocusing—eye divergence—causes the blurring of vision and the subsequent impairing of any further processing of discernable, detailed features which has also been posited as yet another aspect of internal attention’s decoupling from the external environment and commonly labeled as the ‘staring into space’ phenomenon (Walcher, Körner, & Benedek,
2017).
To support this claim, Benedek, Stoiser, Walcher, and Körner, (2017) had participants complete both internally and externally demanding tasks while sitting at a computer while the distance to the monitor was held constant. What resulted was a significantly reduced angle of eye vergence—indicative of visual focus moving outward to farther spatial distances. This staring into space phenomenon corresponded more with the internally directed tasks than the externally-directed tasks. It was again concluded that such behavior acts as a gating mechanism to further assist in decoupling internal attention from external events (Benedek et al., 2017) similarly to how gaze aversion in children has been shown to function as a means to mediate the cognitive load that accompanies the processing of visual information (Doherty-Sneddon & Phelps, 2005). This leads to the assertion that averting one's gaze from external distractors, especially when they are salient, acts as a means to also further support an internally directed attention (Benedek et al., 2017; Walcher et al., 2017).
In line with the above rationale, such a gating mechanism was proposed by Mo,
Liu, Huang, and Ding, (2013) to be unnecessary when the eyes are closed. They came to this conclusion while searching for correlates between alpha and DMN activity under
123 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 both eyes opened and closed resting states. What Mo et al., (2013) found was that a positive correlation existed between alpha activity across the visual system and DMN activity only under the eyes open condition as the relationship was said not to be necessary to facilitate internally directed attention further when the eyes were closed.
The findings are consistent with the literature that strong DMN activity during eyes open conditions are commonly associated with lower visual cortical excitability and thus widely associated with more errors during an externally directed, cognitively demanding task. Parallel to this, the lower visual excitability consistently associated with increased alpha activity, is said to prevent external stimuli from interfering the introspective processing closely associated with self-generated content (Benedek,
Bergner, Könen, Fink, & Neubauer, 2011; Benedek, Schickel, Jauk, Fink, & Neubauer,
2014; Fink & Benedek, 2013) which has also been proposed to be mediated by DMN activity (Spreng & Grady, 2010).
Alpha band activity and creativity. A number of the behaviors addressed above arguably bare more than a passing resemblance to the behaviors consistently associated with strong performers in divergent thinking tasks. Consider, for example, how the resistance to premature closure reflects a top-down executive effort to move past the most salient, near associates as a means to avoid ruminating on only prepotent responses. Also keep in mind that divergent thinking measures are the most widely used assessment of creative thinking capacity (Acar & Runco, 2014; Silvia et al., 2008). At the same time, the higher alpha activity in the posterior brain region that regularly associates with an internally-directed attention also includes specific creativity-related, internally directed tasks such the use of creative idea generation (Fink et al., 2009; Jauk et al., 2012;
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Martindale & Hasenfus, 1978) to solve unreasonable problems (Jausovec, 1997) as well as to arrive at some insight during unknowable problems (Kounios & Beeman, 2014) and with the creation of mental imagery (Bartsch et al., 2015; Cooper et al., 2003). This, then, has led others to conclude that increased alpha activity—especially in areas directly responsible for visual processing—acts as a supportive mechanism in the suppression of irrelevant information processing similar to that which has been shown in relation to better performance during divergent thinking tasks (Krug et al., 2003; Molle et al., 1999;
Razoumnikova, 2000; Razoumnikova, 2004). This relationship can even be logically extended to support how executive control and the suppression of salient, easily recognizable information acts to facilitate farther associative reaching and semantic distance.
Finally, Alpha activity is also said to be particularly responsive to the retrieval and processing of semantic information (Klimesch, 1997, 1999; Klimesch et al., 2011).
These findings come from further partitioning the alpha band frequency into distinguishable low (~8-10Hz) and high (~10-12Hz) bands. Doing so reveals general task demands regarding attention to be closely associated with the lower band activity while more specific task requirements such as semantic memory processing to be closely associated with the higher band activity (Doppelmayr et al., 2002, 2005; Klimesch et al.,
2000).
Most important here is a distinct drop in the upper alpha band activity in conjunction with object recognition and the successful retrieval of the correct semantic information (Klimesch, Fellinger, & Freunberger, 2011). Conversely, the higher alpha activity in the upper alpha band across posterior recording sites has been closely linked to
125 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 the free-associative demands of the divergent thinking task while no such corresponding activity occurred during a convergent thinking task compelling participants to work through a more systematic approach (Fink et al., 2007). It appears then that higher alpha activity, specifically in the upper band (~10-12Hz) is, at least partially, responsible for allowing people to reach farther semantic distances in their associative operations. These creativity-related findings that occur in conjunction with such an increase in upper alpha band activity support key aspects of the current goal of inducing an internally-directed orientation towards the contemplation of options rather than the search for a definitive answer.
Attentional focus.
If you’re still actually reading this; I would love to hear your thoughts over a coffee sometime. Call me at 718-564-5379. We again need to remind ourselves of the constraining aspect of our limited processing capacity and the necessary constricting and consolidating this limitation places on our processing to prioritize only on the information deemed relevant during any ongoing goal and behavior (Pashler, Johnston, & Ruthruff,
2001). With this in mind, we can deduce some conclusions from the use of executive control during divergent thinking tasks as well as how the DMN and alpha band activity interact to support creativity-related outcomes to these tasks. First, it appears that interference management, strategy shifting and set switching to reflect various proactive attempts to suppress the overactivation of irrelevant information to make room for the processing of information whose usefulness is not entirely known. However, how do we know what is potentially relevant information in an unfamiliar event or unreasonable problem space such as an unusual uses task? This is where we begin to reach the farthest
126 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 edges of what empirical findings can support. As such, aspects of what follows start to become increasingly theoretical with concrete support growing increasingly peripheral simply by the nature of our current understanding of many of the involved aspects.
Much of what is being presented does reflect the competitive nature of our attentional focus prioritizing either perceptually-sourced or self-generated content.
Moreover, some of what follows represents a theoretical attempt to conceptualize the overall cognitive system's seemingly sorcery-like capacity to flip its relevance/irrelevance switch under the specific conditions of being exposed to an unreasonable problem. Doing so brings us to a critical aspect of our upcoming methodology; that the improvisational mechanisms responsible for generating these potentially useful, blind variations functions within an internally-directed attention. Conversely, an externally-directed attention reflects the exploitive influence of the narrowing down to a single correct response and the seemingly unyielding urge to only retrieve near, familiar associates from memory to do so.
We know that top-down processes can act as an attentional control mechanism that allows us to stay focused on aspects deemed relevant to the ongoing task at hand through the inhibition of potential interference coming from other task-irrelevant activity
(Klimesch, Sauseng, & Hanslmayr, 2007). This suggests that executive control guides processes away from their depositional systematic approach after some internal realization of an ideation impasse in the problem space. There must also be an additional realization/acceptance in the overall cognitive system that it is necessary to re-evaluate the relevance of the information available. Pinpointing this aspect appears to be more troubling. Some initial insight comes from understanding attention's role in how we place
127 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 value on relevance in regards to what information is deemed necessary enough to process at any given time.
The partitioning of relevance from irrelevance is an entirely common practice; something we do every day when our utilitarian perceptual approach is coupled with an externally focused attention (Cupchik et al., 1994; Gibson, 1971). We found the aesthetic detriments of this dynamic earlier when it was addressed as the reason why novices avoid engaging with stylistic features in aesthetic encounters as they rely too heavily on the perceivable, and easily accessible, semantic information. This reliance, for all of us, is grounded in years of lived experience leading us to semantic information as the only necessary source of usefulness for identification thus, making semantic information the most relevant information in most of our daily, visual encounters. It is in this dynamic that novices will readily, quickly and unconsciously segregate stylistic features out of their attention as such information is registered almost automatically as irrelevant to their immediate goals of identification.
But, in a counter-intuitive context, one where we are explicitly asked to respond creatively to an unfamiliar task, object or event our utilitarian approach to partitioning relevance from irrelevance will ultimately create a self-imposed impasse or conflict with its inclination to search for relevance through semantic information only and the anticipation of known usefulness coming out of identification. If an impasse is maintained long enough, the rationale so far seems to suggest that the cognitive system reaches some degree of awareness of this conflict that, in turn, eventually calls upon executive control to override the usual systematic approach to partitioning relevance and irrelevance. This brings us to attention and how it is an essential component to perceptual
128 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 and cognitive processes. Attention’s interaction with the limiting factor in our broader capacity to process information (Chun & Golomb 2011; Chun & Turk-Brown, 2007;
Smallwood, Brown, Baird, & Schooler, 2012) leads to a dichotomy of sorts between external and internal attentional focuses as representing opposing prioritizations in the meaning-making processes that accompany each.
During externally focused attention, our limiting processing capacity has a specific downstream consequence; attention acts as a spotlight that employs the anticipation of usefulness to amplify relevance over irrelevance (Posner & Dehaene,
1994; Posner & Petersen, 1990). When the system considers these consequences as definitive—such as in the immediate needs of object recognition and identification— external attention dominates the larger cognitive system by allocating resources towards the knowable features of incoming sensory information (Chun, Golomb & Turk-Brown,
2007). We easily appreciate aspects of this exploitation of knowledge in how we prioritize visual features based on their relatability to object representations (Chun &
Golomb, 2011). The resulting content is grounded in the immediacy of sensory information offering identifiable usefulness as the primary referent of such externally focused attention (Andrews‐Hanna, Smallwood, & Spreng, 2014). This, then, allows us to define such content as being perceptually-sourced.
This spotlight approach that helps facilitate the partitioning of relevancy out from the remaining information coming in from the environment does not seem to apply during internally focused attention. Here, attention functions, to some varying degree, in a divorced manner from incoming sensory information and primarily through the selection, manipulation and persistence of self-generated content (Chun, Golomb, &
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Turk-Brown, 2007). However, by what mechanisms does internal attention enact its version of determining relevance over irrelevance in regards to what is worthy of selection, manipulation, and persistence? Also, more specifically, by what mechanisms are such choices made under conditions requiring improvisational intelligence?
Internally-directed attention’s improvisational intelligence. Here we find that the determination of relevance comes in the form of a trial and error approach of more deliberately partitioning information out of the problem space as it becomes recognized as being irrelevant. As we move forward in establishing this rationale, we also need to keep in mind how this relates back to our conceptualizing of an aesthetically conducive perceptual orientation and the use of imaginative faculties being registered as being appropriate during an encounter that offers no usefulness outside of its own contemplation. The absence of such anticipated or knowable usefulness in such encounters—as we are about to see—qualifies ‘art for art sake’ objects and events as unreasonable problems spaces that require contemplation through improvisational intelligence rather than comprehension through dedicated intelligence.
According to Perkins (2000) logic, reasonable problems are those capable of being resolved through any well-practiced strategy based on rules that have been consistently demonstrated as useful by past experience. As such, this type of problem relies heavily on the exploitation of prior knowledge. Such problems are engaged through dedicated intelligence’s ability to extract from memory’s cache of knowable strategies and step-by-step paths by which to apply associative processing based on a variety of successes and failures from previous, similar instances (Cosmides & Tooby, 2002; Jung,
2014; Kanazawa, 2004). By a vast majority, it is believed that we solve problems
130 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 encountered while navigating our everyday world through our accumulated dedicated intelligence and not improvisational intelligence (Cosmides & Tooby, 2002).
Unreasonable problems, on the other hand, only allow for solutions to be discovered by stumbling onto them with the often accompanied “aha!” moment. These unknowable problems, according to Perkin’s (2000) logic, necessitate what we label here as a sort of associative meandering to accumulate evidence that occurs through more improvisational and spontaneous hypothesis testing in regards to how best to cognitively proceed in the face of impenetrable ambiguity.
During the efforts to resolve such a problem there is no clear directive as of how exactly to apply strategies or any subsequent step-by-step logic because the usefulness of incoming sensory information cannot be anticipated due to it residing somewhere between partially unfamiliar and entirely novel. Eventually, if and when an impasse occurs, the overall cognitive system’s more systematic and exploitatory efforts are assumed to ultimately be subjectively perceived as not providing progress (Simonton,
2013). We see evidence of this in novices giving up sooner than experts when attempting to engage contemporary art when they try to perceptually approach such encounters as they would with other everyday objects (Augustin & Leder, 2006; Cohen & Aston-Jones,
2005; Crilly, Moultrie, & Clarkson, 2004; Cupchik, Shereck, & Spiegel, 1994; Hekkert,
1995; Hekkert, Snelders, & Wieringen, 2003; Leder, 2001; Leder, Belke, Oeberst, &
Augustin, 2004; Moles, 1958; Nodine, Locher, & Krupinski, 1993; Parsons, 1987). We also see evidence of attempting to overcome this impasse during efforts to engage interference management, mental set shifting and other strategy shifting in divergent thinking tasks (Gilhooly, Fioratou, Anthony, & Wynn, 2007; Nusbaum & Silvia, 2011).
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Findings like these seem to suggest that the overall cognitive system appears to demonstrate an executive awareness of when its predispositional utilitarian approach is, in itself, registered as no longer useful.
Accompanying this appears to be the further acceptance that the problem requires some cognitive restructuring (Simonton, 2012) or employment of different processes
(Dietrich & Kanso, 2010). This subsequent restructuring closely aligns with the prominent theory regarding insightful problem-solving approaches as a form of preparation for accepting non-prepotent, weakly-activated solutions sourced from more remote associates that are said to ultimately lead to an unexpected insight of some usefulness which, in turn provides the “aha!” moment (Kounios et al., 2006).
It is also well-established that improvisational intelligence is closely related to how the spreading of activation across broader, diffused, recruitment of neural assemblies allows for the more spontaneous, chance combinations in associations that arise from self-generated content (Beaty, Silvia, Nusbaum, Jauk, & Benedek, 2014; Bowden, Jung-
Beeman, Fleck & Kounios, 2005; Campbell, 1960; Jung, 2014; Mednick, 1962). It is additionally argued that such an approach is considered to be adaptive in that it allows evidence accumulation to generate variety in potentially useful alternatives when attempting to navigate or resolve never before encountered, novel problems (Campbell
1960; Jung, 2014; Simonton, 2013). This, then, brings us to the use of improvisational intelligence and its ability to be unscripted and unsystematic in its approach to freely accumulate evidence towards unreasonable problem (Boyd, Richerson & Henrich, 2011;
Jung, 2014; Kanazawa, 2004). To further expound on this more deliberate, internal approach, we need to go back again to our understanding of creativity.
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At the core of Campbell’s (1960) BVSR model of creativity is the generating and testing of ideas that offer no already known or anticipated usefulness. Both Campbell
(1960) and Toulmin (1972) argued that this trial and error generation of blind variations requires a vacuum—entirely removed from whatever occurrences stimulated the generative processes in the first place. We can interpret this extreme stance as an internally-directed attention completely decoupled from incoming sensory information.
In such circumstances, evidence accumulation to generate a variety of alternatives—the usefulness of which to be determined later—is the most appropriate approach until a subsequent path is recognized as a suitable approach to narrow down these alternatives.
Consider this in its opposite manner; testing ideas of which their usefulness is already known would be a sort of confirmation or fact-checking (Simonton, 2013). Moreover, we find this converse manner of narrowing down to one, correct response in the second half of the BVSR model; what we now commonly refer to as convergent thinking (Cropley,
2006).
Also, while Simonton (2013) agrees with blind variation being a critical aspect of creative thinking, he, however, does not consider a total detachment; the complete inability to anticipate the usefulness of information contained within an unfamiliar/novel encounter—or, for our sake, a full decoupling from incoming sensory information—as being necessary for the generation of blind variations. Instead, Simonton (2013) views the detachment that precipitates improvisational intelligence as something that can be reflected through degrees of freedom found in certain aspects of improvised contemplation.
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Unlike the application of dedicated intelligence towards a predefined problem with already established strategies, improvisational intelligence appears to become an increasingly appealing approach as the difficulty in anticipating an idea's usefulness increases. Specifically, for Simonton, (2013) this is reflected in the subjectively perceived levels of originality and usefulness of an idea and even the level of which an idea's usefulness can be anticipated. Simonton proposes that we generally have a subjective impression of when our ideas are more or less conventional or more or less unique. For example; if a moderately original idea is highly useful, but this usefulness is entirely unanticipated—in that it is stumbled upon by chance—then it would follow that the arrival of such a conclusion would evoke a higher level of surprise (a more intense "aha!" moment). Conversely, arriving at the idea would not be as surprising if it was subjectively perceived as low in both originality and usefulness while also being somewhat anticipated.
This subjectively sensed level of information's usefulness helps explain aspects of the orientation shifting during a novel, never before encountered problem. Consider the context of being burdened by a cognitively demanding task presented as an unreasonable problem. A certain awareness of not making progress occurs when one's efforts to exploit prior established knowledge as the primary referent is recognized as consistently failing to solve the problem. Correctly, one eventually realizes their utilitarian approach is only resulting in associations that are consistently demonstrating themselves as being irrelevant to the problem as in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon where you know the name of the person in front of you is not ‘John’ but your mind keeps fixating on ‘John.’
Hence, the constant bombardment of these overly activated near associates and their
134 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 resulting prepotent responses—like ‘John’ in this example—are increasingly being realized as an obstruction.
The rationale so far suggest that when this growing awareness occurs in an unreasonable problem space, it is improvisational intelligence that works in conjunction with an internally-directed attention to necessitate the reallocation of resources. Some resources seem to go to the suppression of interference coming from the overly-activated near associates while other resources go to a heightening of receptivity to the more spontaneous generation of associates. So it is here, in an internally-directed attention, that we come to appreciate how aspects regarding the determination of relevance act in a counter fashion to that of the spotlight effect of external attentional focus. Instead of anticipating the usefulness of information and automatically casting out what is assumed to be irrelevant, the use of improvisational intelligence to produce more spontaneous associates works through a trial and error approach of accumulating evidence until some aspect of its information's usefulness is recognized as applicable to the problem space.
When spontaneous accumulation of evidence is the appropriate perceptual approach
Now, much of what has been proposed is only loosely tied together theoretically.
Nonetheless, the findings of one EEG study points to some of the underlining mechanisms involved in the shifting dynamic of neural activity as it occurs under the condition of when an unreasonable problem immediately becomes a reasonable one.
The most noteworthy aspect of Schettino, Loeys, Delplanque, and Pourtois (2011) methodology was the use of EEG recording over regions involved in both the DMN and saliency network to capture shifting neural activity across the presentation of six versions
135 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 of the same image with incremental increases in visual clarity allowing an initially blurred image to become recognizable. The EEG recordings accompanying these image series reflects the shifting activity that occurs under conditions when exploratory processes immediately precede the instance when exploitatory processes associated with object recognition are registered as accessible. The temporal fidelity of the EEG data showed that the PCC was highly active during the presentation of images that were too blurred to recognize. This activity was abruptly extinguished at the point where visual clarity incrementally improved enough to provide recognition. Most importantly, it was during this instance when object recognition became available that the PCC activity was sharply replaced with a spike in dACC activity.
The researchers concluded that the PCC activity reflected participants accumulating perceptual evidence prior to being able to identify the object in the image.
The researchers interpreted the dACC absence of activity during the initial, elevated PCC activity as an indicator of the dACC’s role of being ready for, and responding to, conflicting information (Schettino et al., 2011). And yet, we can extend this interpretation in looking at their findings within the broader context of what others have established regarding the dACC.
The dACC, along with the insula, is considered a central component in a salience network (Seeley et al., 2007; To, De Ridder, Menovsky, Hart & Vanneste, 2017). The dACC is also found to have a relationship with heightened arousal during effortful cognitive behavior as the ACC, in general, is considered to even function in the modulation of arousal based on contextual cues (Critchley et al., 2003). Contextual cues, here, refers to the incorporating of supplemental information such as an object’s
136 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 surroundings as a means to more efficiently identify the object. For example, we would likely identify a knife in an image of a kitchen faster than we would if the knife was in an image of a beach. Such contextual cues are intrinsically linked to higher levels of visual clarity in regards specifically to visual clarity facilitating visual identification.
Elsewhere, the dACC, along with the medial superior frontal cortex, anterior insula/frontal operculum, and anterior prefrontal cortex, are said to make up a task- control network believed to regulate goal-directed behavior by adjusting strategy use
(Dosenbach et al., 2007) through top-down signaling regarding what is relevant to the task at hand (Wen, Liu, Yao & Ding, 2013). This regulating is said to include the deactivation of other areas based on current task conditions (Sambataro et al., 2010; van
Eimeren et al., 2009; Ossando´n et al., 2011; Sharp et al., 2011) as well as the dACC’s function within this task control network to suppress irrelevant, distracting information
(Botvinick et al., 2004; Corbetta et al., 2008; Dosenbach et al., 2006; Fan et al., 2011;
Kerns et al., 2004; Logan & Gordon, 2001; Nelson et al., 2010; Sridharan et al., 2008).
With this in mind we can expound on the sudden shift away from PCC activity at the moment object recognition became available as an aspect of the dACC function to act as part of the mechanism that monitors how to respond to an impasse or conflict. Let us recontextualize Schettino et al., (2011) blurred versions as an example of Perkins' (2000) unreasonable problem where ill-defined, novel problem prevents experience-based knowledge from advancing the application of any systematic approach or step-by-step strategies. Such an impasse or conflict would necessitate a sort of associative meandering through ambiguity in regards to how best to cognitively proceed through the perceptual problem. Eventually in Schettino et al. 's (2011) sequence of events, and just as Perkin's
137 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 asserted, a sudden insight follows this stagnate period lacking any progress at the instance when visual clarity allows for recognition. It is worth noting that in Schettino et al. 's
(2011) case, this sudden insight—coming from the increased visual clarity—is perceptually sourced, not internally generated. Even so, the shift in how best to respond is demonstrated.
As such, these findings still point to the overall cognitive system’s most practical approach to perceptually engaging these unrecognizable images was—first, as they concluded—that of a passive acceptance of accumulating evidence while the capacity to reach for any final determination was registered as inaccessible. However, more specifically, that this PCC activity during exposure to the blurred versions suggests aspects of a mechanism that intentionally promotes a more spontaneous and unsystematic approach to associative processes in the hopes of serendipitously stumbling onto insight.
Recall that during unreasonable problems, the vagueness/ambiguity of that which is unfamiliar is all the cognitive system has to work with until insight either fortuitously materializes, or a more systematic strategy becomes apparent with the arrival of a better defined, more knowable problem—as in the case with these blurred images becoming increasingly recognizable. With this in mind, the speculative assertion here that the spontaneity of associative meandering is adaptive; In light of the rationale being established, what these findings suggest is that the cognitive system is unconsciously capable of moving away from its own predisposition. Under conditions of unresolvable ambiguity, a more exploratory approach of simply accumulating evidence in a spontaneous fashion is registered through some logic as being the most appropriate perceptual approach until salient information becomes available again.
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Additionally, the adaptive nature of this associative meandering appears to be related to both the activation of the PCC as well as its deactivation being directly regulated by the dACC when an actual strategy becomes accessible. Such an interpretation is further reinforced by a range of findings connecting increased PCC activity with self-generated content (Blakemore, Rees, & Frith, 1998; Passingham,
Bengtsson, & Lau, 2010), the imagination (Smallwood et al., 2016), creativity (Jung et al., 2010; Jung et al., 2013), and even free exploration in a virtual environment (Maguire,
Frith, Burgess, Donnett, & O'keefe, 1998). All of these findings place the PCC in close relation with an internally-directed attention. Finally, in taking a step back, we consider again the challenge of engaging with art for art sake and in the context of such artworks representing an unreasonable problem space. Here, the internally-directed associative meandering we are arguing for appears to be the ideal way to conceptualize how a contemplative effort to engage something that is novel, and likely semantically challenging can oppose a systematic approach to comprehend such an unreasonable problem on a declarative level.
Locating a feasible manipulation that can induce the perceptual orientation shift
In the broadest sense, the goal of the current study is to begin exploring when, and under what type of resource-demanding conditions does the larger cognitive system allow for or support a more contemplative, perceptual approach to visually engaging as opposed to its customary utilitarian approach. Guiding the rationale behind this intention is the underlining appreciation of the information processing constraints that we all function under. To consistently and successfully navigate the world around us, as well as prosper across a lifespan, we must all be capable of both filtering out unwanted
139 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 information and do so in a context-specific manner. As such, we consider our perceptual orientation as being representative of a broader competitive framework between external and internal states of attentional focus (Chun et al., 2011).
Thinkers in philosophical aesthetics addressed this competitive framework long before we had empirical evidence. Their thoughts on our disposition to search for usefulness in everyday value laid the groundwork for the empirical aesthetics literature concerning the distinguishable aspects between novice and expert art viewing experience.
This research helps us further appreciate how the level of automaticity in processing specifically during semantic identification generally places the novice art viewer at a disadvantage in regards to accessing a more deliberate, internal attention that is necessary to engage with and contemplate the aesthetic value being sourced from syntactic information in artworks. This difficulty of moving past an ingrained and systematic approach to assigning cultural meaning and everyday value to aesthetics objects led us to appreciate the imagination’s significance not just in the creation of art but also, and possibly even more importantly, in the viewing of art.
The aesthetic experience as we have come to appreciate it here is a beneficial consequence of some degree of detachment from a utilitarian orientation. We established various justifications for embracing such an understanding. First, that in its original
Greek incarnation, the concept of aesthetics signified the contemplation of things as they are, not as they can be understood in a declarative manner. Second, aligning with this
Greek concept is one of the most defining principles of art; the creating and appreciating of aesthetics objects as being in and of themselves ‘art for art sake objects.' This attitude guides the production of contemporary art coming out of the formal art education system
140 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 through an institutionalized goal of putting things out in our world specifically intended not to have any purpose or usefulness outside of their own contemplation.
In reviewing the literature regarding the brain's predictive control over perception, we establish that most of our perceptual encounters during our daily lives are engaged through such a utilitarian perceptual orientation that commonly accompanies an externally-directed attention. The result of which being that we are inclined to exploit past experiential knowledge in a systematic, automatic effort to apply expectations and anticipated usefulness to what we encounter. This occurs in conjunction with the larger cognitive system's bias against in-depth processing of stimulus information conveying purely sensory level conceptual features (Faivre & Kouider, 2011) that we reviewed as coming from syntactic information. Instead, there is a preference to retrieve overly activated near associates and prepotent response automatically. Such proficiency at object recognition and categorization becomes both the cause and effect of an everyday visual expertise that we develop across a lifespan.
The consequences of such expertise negatively impact the novice art-viewing experience as its accompanying utilitarian, perceptual approach results only in a superficial experience governed by those cognitive efforts intent on only reaching a declarative level of understanding as opposed to the contemplative level of engagement consistently recorded in those with art specific expertise. Moreover, when we consider this in the context of our everyday visual expertise, we come to appreciate why most of us are not well-practiced at perceptually engaging object and events from a perspective of seeing them as ends in-and-of themselves. The reason being, again, the competitive nature between our external and internal attention and our overwhelming level of
141 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 experience of successfully navigating the visual aspect of everyday life with an externally-directed attention and its accompanying utilitarian perceptual orientation. To put it simply; we are all predisposed to orientating our visual perception of an object or event towards understanding its everyday usefulness to our needs and goals, and this inclination is not helpful when that object or event has no easily declarable purpose.
Additionally, the conceptualization of the aesthetic experience proposed here breaks from aspects within its traditional understanding in two ways. First, by narrowing down the type of engagement effort that constitutes an aesthetic experience to only contemplation as opposed to comprehension. Aligning with this logic is the assertion that comprehension is distinguishable from contemplation by the fact that cultural meaning of an aesthetic object can be easily conveyed with declarative labels—such as its historical significance—while its aesthetic value can only be contemplated in a highly individualized manner. Secondly, this rationale allows for the reconceptualizing of what accurately distinguishes novice from expert art-viewing experiences as being much more nuanced than the acquisition of sophistication. This brings about the importance of creative thinking via imaginative faculties in the viewing of aesthetic objects which is also underrepresented in the empirical aesthetics literature.
Taking these stances leads to a more refined intention of the current project; to investigate a conceptualization of the aesthetic experience that breaks from that which is occasionally applied in empirical aesthetics. The critical departure here is to move away from what appears to be a misguided emphasis on imbuing art with cultural significance as a quantifiable component in the mislabeling of a cultural experience as an aesthetic experience.
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As such, it is asserted here that the only aesthetically conducive perceptual orientation is one that facilitates an internally-directed exploration of self-generated content coming in the form of contemplating new and unfamiliar interpretations from the blending and interacting of semantic and syntactic features contained within any object or event that can potentially offer aesthetic value. This occurs not through automatically labeling what is recognizable but, instead, through the use of one's imaginative faculties to move past such superficial engagements.
It is also assumed that such a capacity is generally accessible across a broad audience. And yet, only the expert art viewer is capable of consistently demonstrating the ability to shift towards this internally-directed exploration in the art-specific context intentionally. As such, the more nuanced distinction between expert and novice art viewers is the appreciation of how higher order processes allow for the suppression one's everyday visual expertise and its seeming desperation to reach concrete conclusions through efficient, systematic, and superficial processing pushing through to only a declarative level of engagement that relies heavily on saliency and semantic identification. What allows for contemplation, then, is a necessary detachment from this everyday visual expertise, the use of which is considered here to being antithetical to the capacity to access aesthetic value.
We reviewed how divergent thinking can act as a proxy for the use of imaginative faculties and how divergent thinking is considered by some to be the generative first half of creative thinking and how there is strong evidence that good divergent thinking performance relies heavily on executive control. In looking specifically at divergent thinking, we learned the importance of executive control as a means to suppress overly
143 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 activated near associates and their resulting, prepotent responses. We additionally reviewed parallels in EEG findings showing alpha band activity being the purported mechanism by which the cognitive system suppresses the over-activation of task- irrelevant processing in a context-specific manner. Much of this support comes out of decades of research connecting alpha band activity with executive control, divergent thinking as well as creativity. All of this supports the claim that alpha band activity facilitates the suppressing of the automaticity of the visual cortex's search for everyday usefulness when attempting to self-generate more original thoughts.
Executive control's role in suppression of what may be readily accessible but deemed irrelevant represents one half of the dynamic that allows our underlining meaning-making processes to reach farther semantic distances in their associative activities. The holistic aspect of this dynamic becomes more evident when looking at findings within the default mode literature. Here, executive control's ability to selectively suppress specific systematic processing is not only aligned with DMN activity but also functions alongside the DMN's facilitating of spontaneous cognition taking a more influential role during states of internally-focused attention.
For our purposes, then, the orchestrating of these two aspects; suppressing overly-activated near associates while simultaneously allowing unprompted, more remote associates to be contemplated is considered, here, to constitute a perfect storm scenario for accessing the imaginative faculties during associative, meaning-making processes. All of this is especially relevant when considering how our everyday visual expertise dominates the perceptual approach of the inexperienced among us when being exposing to aesthetic objects and events that are either highly representational and/or semantically
144 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 challenging; an oft-common combination of characteristics found in contemporary art which is notorious for having no purpose other than its own contemplation.
This brings us back to sophistication alone not being a nuanced enough explanation for the experiential distinction between novices and experts in the context of aesthetic encounters.
This assertion requires a few assumptions. First, that art-specific expertise does not engender one's capacity for executive control. Instead, art-specific expertise helps to foster an increasing habituation for the appropriateness of using one's already established executive capacity during encounters registered as potentially offering aesthetic value.
Increased experience in the art-viewing context brings about an increased opportunity to rehearse the engaging of one's naturally occurring executive functioning. An awareness develops over time that using executive control during aesthetic encounters allows one to move past their interfering inclination towards a more superficial, declarative level of engagement. Doing so is not only becomes suitable but also preferable. In a sense, art- specific expertise eventually overrides everyday visual expertise. With this comes the follow-up assumption that novices are just as naturally capable of using executive faculties except they are both unaware of the benefits as well as untrained in engaging their innate executive faculties during aesthetic encounters. The reason is that these two aspects appear to be gained only from increased, repetitious exposure and experience in the specific art-viewing context.
The proposed manipulation of visual clarity. This brings us to the proposed manipulation as a possible means to artificially and temporarily shift the novice’s perceptual orientation aware from comprehension and towards contemplation by
145 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 suppressing aspects of their predisposed utilitarian approach and its declarative level of engagement. The manipulation is proposed to function through temporarily suppressing their everyday visual expertise's heavy reliance on semantic information and its resulting prepotent responses. In doing so, resources are reallocated to higher-order aspects of an internally-directed attention to be more exploratory and spontaneous in nature; thus, allowing longer engagements to reach farther semantic distances in their associative activities.
The most relevant applied implication of what is being proposed here is the potential narrowing of the gap between the novice and expert art viewing experience, especially in the contemporary art context where artworks generated under the guiding principle of art for art sake are commonly considered to be more challenging for the inexperienced among us. To this end, it posited here that there is potential to bridge the gap between the depth of engagement between these two subgroups without the need of years of art specific experience.
To attempt this, a pre-task, immersive, manipulation of the visual field will, presumably, induce a short-lasting shift in participants’ orientation that will hopefully linger long enough to influence their perceptual engagement with imagery that follows.
The task itself will assess their engagement with the subsequent imagery will be through quantifying their associative activity following the well-established methodology from the divergent thinking literature in regards to measuring semantic distance as a quantifiable proxy for imaginative, contemplative thinking.
The rationale points to object recognition and specifically to how semantic information facilitates it as a cognitive bottleneck (obstruction/logjam/congestion) of
146 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 sorts preventing the inexperienced among us from moving past our inclination towards more superficial perceptual engagements in the context of accessing aesthetic value. As such, the proposal here addresses this aspect through the manipulation of visual clarity.
Support for the cognitive impact of visual clarity comes mostly from research that re- contextualizes exploratory and exploitatory approaches regarding the preferential engagement of either global or local features in visual perception. Additionally, two specific aesthetics-related empirical findings will also further support how visual clarity interacts with exploratory and exploitatory approaches.
In regards to object recognition, a useful practice to investigating global and local features in the laboratory is through the manipulation of an image’s perceivable features through the filtering out of specific spatial frequencies as a means to accurately measure how both global and local visual features impact cognitive processes (Costen, Parker, &
Craw, 1996). Research consistently finds that lower spatial frequencies (LSF) provide the perception of global features while higher spatial frequencies (HSF) give the details necessary to resolve local features (Robertson, 1996; Shulman, Sullivan, Gish, & Sakoda,
1986; Shulman & Wilson, 1987). To be specific, the blurring of visual clarity in research is helpful as it can quantifiably remove degrees of visual clarity and thus cause all the recognizable details that reside in the spatial frequencies above the chosen filtering threshold to become imperceptible.
Such manipulations have been useful in research addressing the recognition of various objects types. Here, identification performance acts as a function of the spatial frequencies the images are filtered through. For images of faces, a medium range of spatial frequencies (8—16 cycles/image—cpi) has been shown to be crucial for face
147 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 identity (Costen et al. 1994, 1996; Parker & Costen, 1999). Elsewhere, Collishaw & Hole
(2000) showed that blurring facial features down past 8 cpi produced decrements in the identification of celebrity faces and thus, concluded that continued blurring below this spatial frequency will negatively impact the processing of both global and local features because the remaining information at the lowest spatial frequencies is too coarse even for generalities to be perceived (Collishaw & Hole, 2000).
Similar effects are also found in the processing of images depicting natural scenes. Filtering down such images to only provide LSF information has a detrimental impact on visual categorization while having almost no impact on a visual detection
(Coubard et al., 2011). This, too, bring our attention to how the removing of the salient, recognizable features from perception further highlights the distinction between a purely sensory experience and the experience of perceiving something with the precision necessary to declaratively label it. Visual detection being distinguishable from visual categorization harks back to the Greek's notion of aesthetics being a purely sensory experience distinguishable from perceiving something that as it is declaratively knowable.
Spatial frequencies have also been shown to evoke a hemispheric difference in the visual processing of global/local features with the right hemisphere biasing LSF information and its resulting global features while the left biases HSF information and its local features (Flevaris, Bentin, & Robertson, 2011B). Additionally, at the level of functional connectivity, response distinctions to different spatial frequencies is reflected in the impact visual clarity has over the interaction between the default mode and saliency networks.
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Next, we look again at the methodology of Schettino, Loeys, Delplanque, and
Pourtois (2011) use of EEG recording to capture shifts in neural activity across the presentation of various versions of the same image with increasing levels of visual clarity. This incremental in visual detail occurred in the form of adding HSF information to the previously presented version. The behavioral results showed that accuracy in the task reached past the at-chance level at approximately 8-cpi. The EEG recordings accompanying these images showed that the PCC was highly active during the presentation of images that were too blurred to recognize. This activity was abruptly extinguished at the point where visual clarity incrementally improved enough to provide recognition (~8-cpi).
Most importantly, it was during this instance when object recognition became available that the PCC activity—an integral part of the DMN—was sharply replaced with a sudden spike in dACC activity; considered a key component in the saliency network
(Dosenbach et al., 2007; van Eimeren, Monchi, Ballanger, & Strafella, 2009; Ossandón et al., 2011; Sambataro et al., 2010; Sharp et al., 2011; Wen, Liu, Yao, & Ding, 2013).
Again, recall that we interpreted the associative meandering linked with the PCC’s activity as reflecting the cognitive system’s best hope to accumulate evidence under perceptual conditions that prevent the application of more systematic strategies. This interpretation of PCC activity being related with associative meandering is bolstered by various findings connecting increased PCC activity with self-generated content
(Blakemore, Rees, & Frith, 1998; Passingham, Bengtsson, & Lau, 2010), the imagination
(Smallwood et al., 2016), creativity (Jung et al., 2010, Jung, Mead, Carrasco, & Flores,
2013) and divergent thinking (Fink et a., 2010; Runco & Yoruk, 2014),
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Elsewhere, studies also adopt the Gaussian blur function in image editing software such as Photoshop as a useful, methodological tool to remove the visual saliency of objects. Carretié, Ríos, Periáñez, Kessel, and Álvarez-Linera, (2012) demonstrated that filtered down background distractor images to 6-cpi was a successful way to block the saliency of the objects depicted in these images from negatively impacting performance of an unrelated digit categorization task presented in the foreground. It was concluded that removing the visual clarity of the background images was beneficial for preserving resources for the actual categorization task at hand (Carretié et al., 2012). The same logic of protecting resources shown here by removing one's capacity for semantic identification has also been shown to positively impact our ability to be more original in our capacity to generate unusual uses. (Baror & Bar, 2016)
Similarly, LSF images filtered down to 6-cpi is found in Bar et al., (2006) where fMRI imagery was used to capture LSF images of everyday objects evoking significant increased OFC activity over their HSF versions. Additionally, Bar et al., (2006) concluded that both LSF and HSF information was necessary for optimal recognition given that they found recognition was slower for each separately when compared to their non-filtered version. And while the non-filtered images produced the highest recognition accuracy, the OFC responses were similarly stronger for non-filtered and LSF versions when compared to their HSF counterpart. The logic is that LSF information shuttled forward by magnocellular projections appears to promote the generation of various, initial predictions in the OFC (Bar et al., 2006). These predictions have, elsewhere, been labeled as rough guesses towards a possible, later identity of an object (Winsler,
Holcomb, Midgley, & Grainger (2017). However, at the back of the brain, the details
150 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 housed in HSF information only allows for the visual processing of specific, local features to slowly converge down to a single identity.
This suggests the OFC’s role in recognition as being consistent as long as LSF information is present but, more importantly, that the OFC functions independently from
HSF information. This supports how others have come to consider LSF information to be useful for recognition; by exploring global features as a means to generate multiple guesses which would later assist in the already slower narrowing down processing of more local features (Oliva & Torralba, 2006). Furthermore, while conflicting global features can negatively impact local processing time, conflicting local features do not have a similar impact on global processing time (Hughes et al., 1996). In this light, we see the OFC’s independence from HSF information as a means to block local feature information from interfering with global processing.
The capacity to process global features as the information source for generating potential hypotheses to occur in isolation from the interference of local features appears to play some role in facilitating this initial exploratory behavior. With this in mind, the visual processing of global features begins to resemble the mechanisms responsible for both the suppressing of overly-activated near associates and increased sensitivity to more spontaneously generated associates that we find in divergent thinking. At the other end of the spectrum is the visual cortex's specialization for exploiting HSF information as a means to narrow available information down to a single response. This resembles divergent thinking's counterpart; convergent thinking. Moreover, when combined, we begin to get a picture of how the cognitive system approaches and processes spatial frequencies, and it is reminiscent of Campbell's (1960) BVSR model. LSF information
151 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 initially promotes the generating of multiple, potentially useful options—similar to how we understand divergent thinking while the visual cortex's predisposition for HSF information appears structured for the convergence down of processing to a single response and hence resembles the efforts of convergent thinking. There are unmistakable similarities here; the underlining nature and sequence of events that constitute how the cognitive system processes LSF and HSF visual information appears to be no different from that of how many have come to conceptualize creativity.
In stepping back to look particularly at aesthetics, we revisit, again, the importance of creativity not just in producing but also in viewing artworks, especially when they may be semantically challenging. To start, Boccia et al., (2014) classified participants as demonstrating either a global or local perceptual style when attempting to engage ambiguous artworks with those showing the global approach presenting more exploratory behavior. We also find creativity-related responses even when ambiguity is artificially increased as the experimental manipulation. In Hekkert’s (1995) findings, experts judged degraded versions (digitally blurred) of post-impressionistic paintings as being higher in originality than novices. These findings are curious because post-
Impressionism —even without the extra blurring—is already an additional step beyond
Impressionism’s efforts to distance itself from the classic, western approach of striving to imitate nature. And while these experts’ views—regarding the blurring of what was already somewhat visually ambiguous as suggestive of being more original—were not shared by the novices in Hekkert’s study, the inexperienced viewer has elsewhere been shown to offer contemplation-related responses when exposed to artworks with reduced visual clarity.
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Across a general audience, Wang, Mo, Vartanian, Cant & Cupchik, (2015) demonstrated that viewing traditional Chinese landscape paintings are subjectively experienced differently than traditional western landscape paintings with higher self- reported levels of relaxation and mind wandering. The western paintings, on the other hand, produced higher, self-reported levels of object recognition and object-related absorption. However, across these subjective differences, there was no significant difference in preference ratings for the two painting types (Wang et al., 2015). The key aspect here is the role of visual clarity had. Traditional Chinese landscape paintings are usually duo-tone or tri-tone images where ink and pigment are applied in a manner that softens and blurs the edge boundaries of their content; recognizable visual elements will blend, fade and disappear into each other.
Additionally, these paintings are known for their incorporation of empty space as where these visual elements transition in and out of existence. In a general sense, these traditional Chinese landscape paintings present a diffused, almost ephemeral scene.
Conversely, western landscape paintings come from a long European tradition of striving to present accurate, literal reproductions of nature. These paintings exemplify the use of hard-edged detail and a full spectrum of vibrant colors allowing for well-defined forms to be highly mimetic, static representations of nature. Wang et al.’s (2015) finding brings us, again, back full-circle to the information type distinction between semantic and syntactic information and how the use of multi-dimensional scaling has been used to extract two dimensions corresponding with this distinction. The first dimension being that of linear (hard-edge) and semantic information contrasting painterly (soft-edge) and syntactic information while the second dimension separates representational imagery and
153 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 semantic information from abstract imagery and syntactic information (Berlyne &
Ogilvie, 1974; Cupchik, 1974). Taken together, Hekkert and Wang provide aesthetics- related, peripheral support for the argument that our perceptual style can be influenced to behave in either a more exploratory or exploitatory manner. Furthermore, Wang et al.,
(2015) also shows support for this across a general audience.
Inducing a tuning After effect
Most importantly to the manipulation in the upcoming methodology is the evidence that specific spatial frequency information can initiate a temporarily-enduring sensory adaptation. This tuning after effect—for the lack of a more appropriate label— pushes perceptual styles toward either the exploitation of local features or the exploration of global features. When asked to attend to local feature information, participants have been shown to improve subsequent detection of HSF information. Alternatively, there is a subsequent result of further facilitating the detectability of LSF information when tasked to analyze global feature information instead (Shulman & Wilson, 1987). In an extended series of experiments, Flevaris, Bentin, and Robertson, (2011A; 2011B) showed this effect specifically with varying spatial frequency information. They found that attending to the HSF information in these primes facilitated faster responses times for recognition of local features in follow-up probes. These researchers then extending their own findings with an inverse design (spatial frequency primes [adaptors] and processing level probes) as well as demonstrating a hemispheric difference in spatial frequency processing showing a strong tuning response in the right hemisphere after LSF information and in preparation for global feature processing (Flevaris, Bentin, & Robertson, 2011B).
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The HSF—local feature aftereffect can be argued to reflect a vital aspect of the everyday lives of anyone with normal or corrected to normal vision; that increasing visual clarity which, allows recognition of knowable content to become easier, has a priming effect of further narrowing our visual search to only easily recognizable, comprehensible content in what we subsequently perceive. Our utilitarian orientation, then, appears to act in a manner that reinforces itself. Said differently; our reliance on sharp focus perpetuates itself.
This is a bold assertion but consider it in the context that we evaluate objects automatically as well as assess semantic meaning rapidly (Glaser & Bandai, 1999).
Attention modulation in the form of sensory adaptation such as sharpening models (Li,
Miller & Desimone, 1993) and the later facilitation model (Gauthier, 2006) address just this by positing that adaptors/primes can improve the coding of similar stimulus features of subsequent targets by means of synaptic efficacy and thus help facilitate faster identification. Others frame this as neural tuning towards familiar rather than novel stimuli where a reduction of activity accompanies more rapid responses times (Race,
Shanker, & Wagner, 2009). Aspects of this reduction involved in the semantic identification of previously experienced objects and events reflects efficiency in moving away from retrieval and analysis of stimulus-level conceptual features and, instead, to a direct response retrieval (Faivre & Kouider, 2011) presumably enabled by a learned stimulus-responses association (Dobbins et al., 2004; Schacter, Dobbins, & Schnyer,
2004). As such, the formation and automatic retrieval of such learned response associates are believed to permit the cognitive system to bypass a more deliberate engagement with
155 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 a stimulus's purely sensory level features (Dobbins et al., 2004; Horner & Henson, 2008;
Schacter, Dobbins, & Schnyer, 2004).
Such attention modulation also comes in the form of acquired inattention (Yee,
1999) where learning is specific enough to select which features should and should not be attended to in regards to the ongoing task. Still, others consider longer, extended exposure to adaptors/primes as able to induce a degree of selectivity towards diagnostic features while neurons coding features deemed irrelevant for recognition stop responding.
(Desimone, 1996; Wiggs & Martin, 1998). Finally, it is this acquired inattention or selectivity against what is deemed irrelevant that is precisely what is found when novices engage in aesthetics with little or no effort towards addressing syntactic information. This is especially the case when novices' preoccupation with local features is encouraged through their prioritization of semantic information accessible through our culture’s increasing emphasis on visual clarity. In a high-definition world, it is arguable that we increasingly program ourselves to orientate towards visual detail as a means to facilitate faster identification of what we see.
But, most fascinating is that Flevaris, Bentin, and Robertson (2011A, 2011B) also found the oppose aftereffect as well; that response times to global feature probes were faster after participants were told to attend specifically to the LSF information presented in primes that explicitly contained both LSF and HSF information. Supporting the cognitive aspects of this opposing aftereffect of an LSF adaptor is a small collection of studies investigating how impactful resting alpha power is across various, subsequent perceptual and memory tasks. The same state of relaxed but alert wakefulness associated with the default mode activity that originally motivated Raichle's et al. (2001) resting
156 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 state investigation is also reflected in a pronounced level of alpha-band activity during resting state EEG measurements (Klimesch, 1999). Specifically, it has been proposed that resting levels of increased alpha power often captured in the reference baseline before a task can influence the level of alpha power during the task (Doppelmayr, Klimesch,
Stadler, Pöllhuber, & Heine 2002). Under certain conditions, this pre-task, spontaneous alpha oscillations can have a regulatory effect on subsequent visual perception tasks with findings showing that poorer visual discrimination performance follows pre-task, resting periods recorded with increased alpha power over the parieto-occipital sulcus (Van Dijk et al., 2008). This led to the conclusion that the sources regulating visual perception under such conditions of not being sufficiently attentive to the external task is traceable back to higher level cognitions imposing functional inhibition over visual processing through increased alpha power across the visual cortex. Complementary to this are findings that better performance during internally-directed memory tasks is also linked to increased resting alpha activity in the posterior brain during the pre-task baseline while the opposite, lower levels at baseline, are associated with better externally-directed, perceptual performance (Hanslmayr et al., 2005). Elsewhere, higher alpha activity roughly one minute prior to a visual imagery task was associated with higher alpha activity over the parieto-occipital scalp during the task (Salenius, 1995) leading to the conclusion that the less engaged the visual system was prior to a cognitively demanding, external task results in the visual system being less engaged during the task.
These findings have led some to argue that the principal purpose of alpha oscillations are to be the primary mechanism responsible for the synchronization of processing that guides internally-directed attention (Knyazev, Slobodskoj-Plusnin,
157 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
Bocharov, & Pylkova, 2011). The above findings also align well with results showing how increased DMN activity prior to externally-directed cognitive tasks is commonly associated with poorer performance on those tasks, leading to the conclusions that alpha activity is closely related to the DMN (Knyazev, Slobodskoj-Plusnin, Bocharov, &
Pylkova, 2011).
These findings and their varying cognitive impact also support the competitive framework of attentional focus. First, that performance in the context of an externally- directed attention is supported by lower levels of alpha power within the visual cortex during the reference period which in turn is said to suggest that visual processing is already in a primed, more excitatory state to attend to the external environment. Also, secondly that memory performance during an internally-directed, attention-demanding task is enhanced in an opposing fashion when the visual cortex is deactivated by higher levels of synchronized alpha activity prior to memory tasks thus, allowing for the suppression/inhibition of distracting incoming sensory information (Klimesch, Sauseng,
& Hanslmayr, 2007).
Here, we pause to appreciate the potential benefits of exploiting this cognitive impact. Increasing alpha power across the visual cortex immediately prior seems to be advantageous to any task that would benefit from a strong internally-directed attention.
Priming with an emphasis on LSF or global features such as the manipulation being proposed below is reasoned to not only accomplish this pre-task increase of alpha activity but also to support the increased facilitating of global feature processing during the subsequent task. All of which points to inhibiting our predisposition towards local features while promoting of a more deliberate, contemplative perceptual orientation/style
158 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 after exposure to such an adaptor/prime. To bolster this hypothesized effect with more direct support, we look next to how alpha band activity has additionally been explicitly linked back to exposure to the lowest spatial frequencies and their resulting tuning aftereffect.
Alpha band activity is greatly influenced by being immersed inside a diffused dome designed to obscure a visual field's overall clarity. Here, Lehtonen and Lehtinen
(1972) constructed an immersive visual field known as a Ganzfeld apparatus from a large, semi-opaque, plexiglass dome large enough to be placed over the heads of their participants. Doing so prevented the capacity for visual fixation while allowing EEG recording over the occipital poles and posterior temporal areas to show alpha activity across visual processing areas being nearly as high when participants eyes were open under this diffused condition as when their eyes were closed. Worth noting is that this alpha activity dropped by half by merely removing the participants from the dome.
Additionally, Lehtonen and Lehtinen (1972) captured EMG recordings during trials where a small visual target was placed on the dome’s exterior and participants were either instructed to look at it or look away. A short duration ERD accompanied the attempted fixation on the target. However, when the participants were told to look away from the target, the higher alpha activity resumed after a few seconds. Furthermore, the duration of this ERD became increasingly shorter as participants gained experience through additional trials (Lehtonen & Lehtinen, 1972). Additionally, tested in the study was visual vigilance, measured by counting accuracy of visible flashes between the
Ganzfeld and normal viewing conditions. The researchers found that both conditions produced similar levels of accuracy in the counting but, that also, the higher alpha
159 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 activity was still maintained under in the Ganzfeld condition during the counting task while the normal viewing condition's alpha activity remained reduced by roughly half.
This, again, brings us back to Coubard et al.’s (2011) findings that LSF information has a detrimental impact on visual categorization without negatively impacting visual detection and again helps us appreciate the distinction between a purely sensory experience and the experience of perceiving something with the precision necessary to declaratively label it.
Again, this helps us partition out—at the psychophysiological level—aspects of a purely sensory experience of syntactic information as separate from those that guide the efforts to process and comprehend semantic information. The increased alpha activity here in conjunction with the absence of the capacity to fixate corresponds to the visual cortex being in an increased inhibitory state and yet, the overall cognitive system is still perceptually responsive to the presentation of the diffused flashes.
In their summary, Lehtonen and Lehtinen (1972) recognized aspects of this partitioning by concluding that the visual system has two modes of functioning. Like others, they first acknowledged that detailed visual scrutiny, through ocular fixation, is closely associated with desynchronized alpha activity across the visual system that allows for a more excitatory state that facilitates external attention. Additionally, this mode is distinguishable from when alpha activity is highly synchronized in the visual system in the absence of ocular fixation while remaining visually attentive in a more internally- focused state.
The crux here is that our prioritization of semantic information, addressed as far back as Helmholtz and Fechner, can, under certain conditions, be suppressed while perceptually remaining vigilant to the presentation of pure sensory information. It is
160 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 proposed, then, that this is a potential avenue to test the possibility that doing so also allows the reallocation of resources to move away from an exploitatory approach to semantic information and towards the exploratory approach of the overtly ambiguous nature of syntactic information and that doing so represents the access point to an awareness of aesthetic value. Finally, Lehtonen and Lehtinen, (1972) EMG recordings also captured the delayed onset of increased alpha activity each time the dome was placed over participants' heads. Initially, this delay was between 3 and 60 sec. (M = 24 sec) however, after the third donning, this delay dropped to between .5 and 50 sec. (M = 11 sec). Here, then, we find the exact tuning aftereffect proposed to be accomplished by the manipulation in the upcoming methodology; that participants will acclimate within a relatively short period of being immersed in a visual field void of local features to fixate towards. Doing so is proposed, here, to facilitate a more internally-directed and aesthetically conducive, exploratory approach to any immediately following probe stimuli. Specifically, this will be a more in-depth engagement with global, compositional features and the purely sensory presentation of syntactic information while simultaneously de-emphasizing the processing of semantic information for some—as of yet unknown—short duration. It is assumed that creating such an immersive visual environment that degrades visual clarity would also tune the cognitive system to becoming less receptive to fixating on semantic details in subsequent visual engagements—again for some unknown short duration.
The immersive aspect will be accomplished with the use of a virtual reality headset projecting across the entire visual field. The manipulation will be the blurring of the video content to be played during this phase. The design follows the logic of previous
161 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 studies using similar manipulations with still imagery with the blurring of the content to be to the extent that removes the specificity of visual clarity, making object recognition below the at-chance level within the experimental condition. This is assumed to bring about a low cognitive load resting state that, under the condition of the immersion lacking any cognitive task in and of itself should bring about an increase in DMN activity as well as shown to facilitate more exploratory behavior. Additionally, the blurring of the visual imagery to the point of obscuring object recognition has, in and of itself, been shown to bring about resting state activity. This activity as previously addressed is closely associated with the perceptual decoupling that accompanies the shift away from an externally-directed and towards an internally-directed attention. This activity is also consistently, positively associated with better performance in creativity and divergent thinking outcomes.
This brings us precisely to the intentionality behind the use of a 360-degree video in a VR environment as the experimental manipulation. As mentioned in this proposal’s opening paragraph, a key aspect of my initial motive to this project came out of an appreciation for the ancient Greeks' usage of the term aesthetic. For them, it was a means to distinguish how an encounter can be perceived more uniquely on its purely sensory merit from something being perceived more consensually based on pre-established cultural meaning. Expanding on this ancient notion are two influential, mid-20th century, critical theorists and their notions that the visual world we live in negatively impacts our capacity to be creative individuals.
The title of Herbert Marcuse’s One-dimensional man (2013) refers to the flattening of our culture and imaginative abilities into one defining and dominant
162 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 perspective. In it, Marcuse makes his case that we live under an illusion of individualism with the reality being that there is a disappearance of individual thought as advertising, mass media and entertainment industries lull us into conformity. As such, we become conditioned to repress our innate capacity for creative expression behind the veil of consensus.
Guy Debord speaks more specifically about conformity in an image-saturated, consumer culture in his Society of the spectacle (2012). For him, the terms mass media and spectacle would be interchangeable with his central theme; “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (p. 4). To this end, the spectacle is an instrument to distract and pacify people. Imagery contained within the spectacle takes on the responsibility of reducing and interpreting the world for us. In doing so, visual representations only provides simple, bite-size, narratives for us to consume with little effort. This is how the spectacle engineers our behavior; the more we subscribe to its message of what our needs are, the less we can contemplate our own, genuinely individual needs.
Both writers, in their unique manners, can be said to present arguments for us becoming out of practice in regards to having an awareness of the nuances in what we experience. The result for Marcuse is us losing our capacity for creative expression. For
Debord, it is our loss of being individuals while falsely thinking we still are. Now, while their ideas are intriguing, both Marcuse and Debord come across as overly nostalgic for the pre-industrial age while also portraying themselves as media-phobic with critiques that exist in the purely speculative realm. To me, their arguments lack the quantifiable evidence necessary to be taken too seriously. But nonetheless, a curiosity remains. Does
163 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 our everyday, visual world impact our imaginative capacity? And then, of course, there is a methodological curiosity; how does one even attempt to address such a broad cultural critique from an empirical perspective? One cannot test such an overarching theoretical framework with two simple experiments. However, a central tenet can be delicately picked at and examined in the hopes to expound on what I believe to be the intersection between our use of imaginative faculties and the influence the visual world has over this capacity. This is why visual clarity is the central variable to be manipulated, and it is this reason why the manipulation strives to produce as much ecological validity as possible while remaining a highly controllable variable both within and across adaptor conditions.
To this end, the video presented to all participants will be of a common, everyday occurrence depicting a 360-degree view from the middle of a busy coffee shop as means to replicate a snippet of daily life as reliably as possible. It is also anticipated that doing so will offer enough variety to both elicit and maintain some degree of attentive engagement in as natural of a manner as possible across conditions while also either facilitating an externally-directed attention in the control condition as well as an internally-directed attention in the experimental condition. It is here that Latent semantic analysis (LSA) will be employed to measure the semantic distance in participants’ responses as a proxy for levels of originality which in turn will quantify whether the hypothesized impact on shifting the perceptual approach away from exploitation and towards exploration actually occurs.
Latent semantic analysis. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais,
1997; Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998) is a statistical technique for quantifying the latent semantic relationships between words through an analysis of a large corpus of text. This
164 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 is accomplished through its inferencing word relatedness by representing the frequencies of word co-occurrences in a multi-dimensional semantic space. LSA enjoys growing support as studies continue supporting its construct validity as well as the technique demonstrating itself capable of outperforming the time and resource consuming subjectivity of individual raters in quantitatively operationalizing the originality of divergent thinking responses. LSA will be applied in the present research to assess the immersive visual field's subsequent impact on associative activity by providing a quantifiable measure of the semantic distance of the response associations generated while engaging with the imagery.
LSA works by providing a measure for either a word, sentence or entire document’s semantic placement within the broad semantic space of a large corpus. In its one-to-many configuration, a participant's provided response word or phrase are compared to target words or phrases representing the most common, likely responses.
This comparison is made within the semantic space of a larger, representative corpus of the general reading ability at the 1st year, college level. The measure of semantic similarity comes from the cosine of the angle between vectors corresponding to the two inputted words or phrases. This coefficient ranges from -1 to 1 with higher values being more semantically similar. From here, the response’s semantic distance away from the common responses is calculated as the inverse of its similarity coefficient by subtracting the coefficient from 1. This, then, results in a range of values from 0-2 with higher values representing farther semantic distance values.
The use of semantic distance through this exact analysis has been increasingly used in recent years as an assessment of divergent thinking, creativity, and general
165 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 associative activity. The current study follows this logic; in that finding differences here, across conditions, would reflect variations within the retrieval processes of associates as a result of the manipulation. Specifically, if those in the experimental conditions were to provide responses that result in larger semantic distance values, it would be taken to suggest a loosening or relaxation of their dispositional perceptual orientation to fixated on more declarative elements in the service of predominately activating near associates and their resulting prepotent responses. If so, these results would suggest that the manipulation influenced their associative activities in a manner that aligns with Medick’s
(1962) notion of a flattening of associative hierarchies during divergent thinking where activation of remote associates are relatively as likely to activate as near associates.
If these increased semantic distances are also accompanied by longer engagement times for the experimental conditions this would then suggests the spreading of semantic activity that is commonly associated with both the serial order effect (Beaty & Silvia,
2012; Christensen, Guilford, & Wilson, 1957; Johns, Morse, & Morse, 2001; Milgram &
Rabkin, 1980; Parnes, 1961; Phillips & Torrance, 1977; Runco, 1986; Ward, 1969) and resistance to premature closure (Benedek et al., 2011; Kim, 2006A, 2006B; Kim, 2017;
Moore et al., 2009) aspects of superior performance in divergent thinking. This, then, would also suggest the further engagement of executive control as a means to suppress near associates and their resulting prepotent responses. Finally, and most crucially, if the results are as predicted, these findings represent novel insights into the use of imaginative faculties playing a central role in aesthetic experiences.
Furthermore, the design allows for some unique ways of assessing the distinctions between novice and expert viewing experiences. First, a quantifiable measure of semantic
166 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019 distance will enable us to represent these two groups in regards to the depth of their perceptual engagement. Again, the semantic distance measure is not only useful to show how far removed the control novice group is to the control expert group, but it can also show how far the engagement levels of the experimental novice group moves towards the engagement levels of the control expert group. This alone would be highly insightful in understanding how effective the manipulation is at bridging the gap between the depth of engagement between the two groups.
Additionally, the design allows for, what appears to be the first attempt, to find a ceiling effect regarding the depth of engagement in an aesthetic experience. Here, the question regards the two expert conditions and whether the manipulation causes the experimental condition to reach even farther semantic distances in the associates they generate and spend more time engaging with the imagery. Again, no matter what the outcome is, these would be novel results within the field of empirical aesthetics and the role imaginative faculties may play in the aesthetic experience.
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Assumption Testing (study 1)
Outliers. As MANOVAs are sensitive to multivariate outliers, this assumption was checked using Mahalanobis' distance (MD). Here, a linear regression of the three
DVs (semantic distance, contemplation time, typing time) by condition (sharp, blur) was conducted so as to compute a Mahalanobis distance variable. It has been previously recommended (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001) to use the Chi-Square critical values table as a means of detecting if a variable is a multivariate outlier (criterion of α = .001; df = 3).
In regard to this dataset, the maximum MD of 13.70 is well below the critical value of
16.27. This tells us the analysis can continue without concerns for containing multivariate outliers.
Non-multicollinearity. To check for the absence of multicollinearity, a series of
Pearson correlations were performed between the three outcome measures. This
MANOVA assumption states that it is ideal to have all outcome measures moderately related. Table 7 shows such meaningful pattern of correlations being amongst most of the outcome measures and provides support for the appropriateness of conducting a
MANOVA. Furthermore, a Box’s M value of 15.27 was associated with a p value of
.025. This further advocates for the appropriateness of a MANOVA as it suggests the assumption of equivalence of covariance matrices is met.
Table 7 Pearson Correlations Between Semantic Distance, Contemplation Time, Typing Time Variables 1 2 3 1. Semantic Distance - .47** 0.06 2. Contemplation Time .47** - 0.20 3. Typing Time 0.06 0.20 - Note: Used to confirm of assumption of non-multicollinearity. ** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). 194 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
Figure 9. Scatterplot matrices of the DVs for participants in the Sharp condition. Used to confirm the assumption of linearity.
Figure 10. Scatterplot matrices of the DVs for participants in the Blurry condition. Used to confirm the assumption of linearity.
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Table 8 Tests of Multivariate Normality Shapiro- Variable df p-value Wilk Semantic Distance 0.96 63 0.045 Contemplation Time 0.92 63 <.001 Typing Time 0.86 63 <.001 Note. Used to assess multivariate normality assumption. Significant results for Contemplation Time and Typing Time suggest violations of the assumption. In an abundance of caution, the omnibus MANOVA is interpreted using Pillai's Trace.
Table 9 Levene’s Test of Equality of Error Variances Variable Statistic df1 df2 p-value Semantic Distance 2.32 1 61 0.13 Contemplation Time 2.9 1 61 0.09 Typing Time 2.54 1 61 0.12 Note. Used to confirm homogeneity of error variances assumption.
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Assumption Testing (study 2/Time on task analysis)
MANCOVAs can be sensitive to non-normality as well as both multivariate and univariate outliers. There should also be a linear relationship between the dependent variables within each group of the independent variables. Furthermore, covariates should also have a linear relationship with the dependent variables within each group of the independent variables. Linear relationships can be visually scrutinized with a scatterplot matrix. These relationships with the covariate should also show homogeneity of regression slope; meaning these relationships between the covariate and each dependent variable is the same or closely similar in each group of the independent variable. Here, a regression specifying the interaction between the covariates and the dependent variables is expected to produce non-significance for the interaction term. Finally, homogeneity of variance and covariance is tested with Box’s M Test of Equality of Covariance Matrices in order to show these two respective aspects of the dependent variable are also equal in all groups of the independent variable.
Tests of normality. In the original data, significant positive skew was observed in contemplation time, typing time, and expertise. To resolve this non-normality, all three of these variables were log-transformed. Investigation of the Shapiro-Wilk Tests of
Normality (Tables 10, 11, 12) as well as histograms of the distributions (Figures 11, 12,
13, 14) confirm that these transformations largely corrected the skew in these distributions.
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Table 10 Tests of Normality on Full Data Before Transformation (Shapiro-Wilk) Variable W df p-value Baseline Typing Speed 0.96 127 0.22 Expertise 0.82 127 <.001 Contemplation Time 0.76 127 <.001 Typing Time 0.91 127 <.001
Table 11 Tests of Normality on Reduced Data Before Transformation (Shapiro-Wilk) Variable W df p-value Baseline Typing Speed 0.99 126 0.22 Expertise 0.82 126 <.001 Contemplation Time 0.76 126 <.001 Typing Time 0.91 126 <.001
Table 12 Tests of Normality on Reduced Data After Transformation (Shapiro-Wilk) Variable W df p-value Baseline Typing Speed 0.99 126 0.22 (log)Expertise 0.98 126 0.03 (log)Contemplation Time 0.99 126 0.4 (log)Typing Time 1.00 126 0.92
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Figure 11. Histogram of (untransformed) baseline typing test scores. Used to confirm assumption of normality.
Figure 12. Histogram of (log transformed) expertise reports. Used to confirm assumption of normality.
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Figure 13. Histogram of (log transformed) contemplation times. Used to confirm assumption of normality.
Figure 14. Histogram of (log transformed) typing times. Used to confirm assumption of normality.
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Multivariate outliers. As with study 1, this assumption was again checked using
Mahalanobis' distance (MD). A linear regression of the two DVs (contemplation time, typing time) by condition (blurred, clear) so as to compute a Mahalanobis distance variable. Tabachnick and Fidell (2001) suggest using the Chi-Square critical values table as a means of detecting if a variable is a multivariate outlier (criterion of α = .001; df =
2). For this data, maximum MD = 16.22, which is above the critical value of 13.82. One case violated this guideline. After the removal of this case, maximum MD = 11.23, and as such, meets requirements for this assumption.
Univariate outliers. Both dependent variables as well as both covariates had the potential to take on extreme scores (univariate outliers). However, given all data was observed by the experimenter, it is believed that any extreme scores on time are the result of participant effort. As such, neither contemplation time nor typing time were included in outlier analyses due to extreme scores likely representing increased effort on the task, which provides little reason at face value for exclusion. To assess whether a participant was an outlier on Expertise, their standardized score (i.e., Z score) was assessed. Of the
DV’s used only time on task could take extreme scores. Participants were classified as univariate outlier on expertise if their absolute fluency Z score was above 3. Only one participant met this criterion (Z = 5.19). However, her removal little impact on the
Shapiro-Wilk’s test of normality (Table 13). As such, in the interest of data preservation, the analyses did include this participant.
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Table 13 Tests of Normality on Reduced Data After Transformation (Shapiro-Wilk) Variable W df p-value Baseline Typing Speed 0.99 125 0.18 (log)Expertise 0.97 125 0.01 (log)Contemplation Time 0.99 125 0.43 (log)Typing Time 1.00 125 0.94
Linear relationships. In MANCOVA, there should be a linear relationship between each pair of DVs within each group of the IV as well as a linear relationship between the covariate(s) and each DV within each group of the IV. Figures 2E and 2F confirms these assumptions in each group of the IV (Condition)
Figure 15. Scatterplot matrices of the DVs for participants in the Sharp condition. Used to confirm the assumption of linearity.
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Figure 16. Scatterplot matrices of the DVs for participants in the Blurry condition. Used to confirm the assumption of linearity.
Homogeneity of regression slopes. To test the assumption of homogeneity of regression slopes, a regression specifying the interaction between the covariates and the
DV was run. The interaction term from this regression was non-significant for both (log) contemplation time, F(2,119) = 0.27, p = 0.76, and typing time, F(2,119) = 1.76 , p =
0.18, suggesting homogeneity of regression slopes.
Homogeneity of variances and covariances. The main MANCOVA returned a
Box’s M value of 5.28, p = .16, suggesting the assumption of equivalence of covariance matrices is met (Table 14). Furthermore, Levene’s Test of Equality of Error Variances
(Table 14) was non-significant, further supporting accepting the assumption of homogeneity of variance.
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Table 14 Box's Test of Equality of Covariance Matrices Statistic F df1 df2 p-value 5.28 1.73 3 2942853.32 0.16 Note. Used to assess assumption of homogeneity of covariance matrices.
Table 15 Levene’s Test of Equality of Error Variances Variable Statistic df1 df2 p-value (log)Contemplation Time 0.56 1 123 0.46 (log)Typing Time 0.15 1 123 0.70 Note. Used to assess homogeneity of error variances assumption.
Table 16 Univariate Tests of Between-Subject Effects on time measures
Variable F p-value ηp2 Baseline Typing Speed (Log)contemplation time 1.20 0.28 0.010 (Log)typing time 3.64 0.06 0.03 Expertise (Log)contemplation time 2.65 0.11 0.02 (Log)typing time 1.12 0.29 0.01 Condition (Log)contemplation time 0.10 0.75 0.001 (Log)typing time 0.63 0.43 0.005 Note. df1 = 1 and df2 = 121 for all variables.
204 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
Assumption Testing (study 2/Uniqueness analysis)
Non-multicollinearity. Expertise was centered to limit collinearity when including the interaction term. Tests to determine if the data met the assumption of collinearity (Table 17) indicated that multicollinearity was not a concern.
Table 17 Tolerance and VIF Values Variable Tolerance VIF Expertise .428 2.337 Condition .998 1.002 Expertise*Condition .428 2.334 Note. Used to assess multicollinearity. A tolerance of less than .2 and/or a VIF of over 5 can indicate multicollinearity.
Figure 17. Histogram of residuals. Used to assess normality of residuals. Note. Skewness = .819 with Kurtosis = -1.32
205 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
Figure 18. Plot of the residuals appears to "bounce randomly" around the 0 line, suggesting no relationship between the fitted points and the residuals (i.e., the assumption that the relationship is linear is reasonable). This suggests that the variances of the error terms are equal.
Figure 19. Q-Q plot of the distribution of errors suggests that there may be some non- normality at the tails, but generally passes.
206 Texas Tech University, Francesco V. Donato, December 2019
Figure 20. Scale location plot helps to assess the assumption of constant error variance. Ideally, there would be a perfectly be a flat horizontal line. There is a slight indication of non-constant variance (though not enough to warrant intervention).
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