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Home > Scholarly Contributions > Abstracts > Volume 16 Issue 1
Volume 16 Issue 1
ART THEFT IN NEW YORK CITY
TRUC-NHU HO,
Abstract: This exploratory study was conducted to examine the extent of art theft in New York City. The study includes secondary analyses of 229 police complaint reports and twelve completed investigative cases of the NYPD's Art and Antique Investigation Unit collected during the period from January 1985 to December 1988, and personal interviews with a randomly selected sample of forty-five art dealerts in New York. Results from the analysis of police data and the survey were compared, leading to the conclusion that contrary to popular belief, the majority of art theft losses are not substantial and that official records greatly underestimate the extent of this crime.

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EFFECTS OF MUSIC ON THE PERCEPTION OF PAINTINGS
WENDY M. LIMBERT AND DONALD J. POLZELLA,
Abstract: This study tested the influence of musical style on observers' perceptions of representational and abstract paintings. Participants were thirty-six male and thirty-six female undegraduates who viewed eight painting under one of three listening conditions: matching, non-matching, or no music. Participants rated each painting on four semantic-differential scales. Mean ratings were compared using MANOVAs. An interaction of painting style and listening condition (Wilks' lambda = .780, p < .05) showed participants' aesthetic experience of viewing the paintings was intensified when the paintings were accompanied by matching music. A main effect for music style (Wilks' lambda = .718, p < .01) showed participants thought all paintings were less active and more beautiful when accompanied by the impressionist music. There were no significant effects for gender.

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INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN COMPLEXITY PREFERENCE AND ARTISTIC STYLE: NEOCLASSICAL VERUSES EXPRESSIONISTIC AESTHETICS
ROY KING, JITH MEGANATHAN, JILL NAGAHARA, AND MARILIA BOSCOLO,
Abstract: Individual differences in style and emotional of artwork created in an expressive therapy group were correlated with individual aesthetic preferences for visual complexity in order to investigate the dichotomy between classical and expressionistic/romantic aesthetic models. Twenty-two subjects produced artwork rated according to simon's theory of styles. A dimension varying from vivid, nonrealistic, and painterly art to muted, realistic, and linear art was found to be moderately stable across sessions and reliable across raters. This dimension further correlated with subjects' scores on the Barron-Welsh Art Scale, assessing their preference for visual complexity, as well as with ratings of anxious and angry content in their art. These results were interpreted in light recent models of hemispheric lateralizationin complex emotional/visual information processing, in particular, in terms of individual biases in right vs. left cortical arousal.

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MEMORY FOR AESTHETIC QUALITIES
JOHN P. MCLAUGHLIN AND JENNIFER E. CRAMER,
Abstract: Right-handed subjects preferred paintings containing cues that suggested left-to-right (LTR) motion over their mirro-reversed versions. When members of a pair were presented successively, the effect was larger if the LTR version was seen first, but interpolation of other images reduced aesthetic choices to chance levels, even though subjects remembered the first version. When seen second, LTR versions were preferred even when four other images were interpolated, so normally-preferred versions continued to be favored when other images did not follow them. The information required for aesthetic choice is different from that required for simple recognition and is easily disrupted by other visual-cognitive experience.

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MEMORY FOR PICTURE FRAMES
WILMA KOUTSTAAL,
Abstract: Does the frame in which a picture appears become incorporated with our mental representation or memory for the picture? In five experiments, participants were shown several colored drawings, each set in a unique frame, and then later were given an unexpected memory test for the drawings and frames. Participants who initially performed a task that focused their attention on the drawings alone (rating the pleasingness or visual complexity of the drawints) were unable to correctly identify the frames as same or different at above chance levels. In contrast, participants who initially performed a task that focused attention on the drawings in relation to the frames (rating the suitability of the frames for the drawings, or the darkness of the drawings compared to the frames), showed significantly greater than chance frame identifications. Relational or interactive encoding of a picture and its frame is critical for memory of picture frames.

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PERCEIVING HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES IN NONREPRESENTATIONAL PAINTINGS
TSION AVITAL AND GERALD C. CUPCHIK,
Abstract: A series of four experiments were conducted to examine viewer perceptions of three sets of five nonrepresentational paintings. Increased complexity was embedded in the hierarchical structure of each set by carefully selecting colors and ordering them in each successive painting according to certain rules of transformation which created hiearchies. Experiment 1 supported the hypothesis that subjects would discern the hierarchical complexity underlying the sets of paintings. In Experiment 2 viewers rated the paintings on collative (complexity, disorder) and affective (pleasing, interesting, tension, and power) scales, and a factor analysis revealed that affective ratings were tied to complexity (Factor 1) but not disorder (Factor 2). In Experiment 3, a measure of exploratory activity (free looking time) was correlated with complexity (Factor 1) but not with disorder (Factor 2). Multidimensional scaling was used in Experiment 4 to examine perceptions of the paintings seen in pairs. Dimension 1 contrasted Soft with Hard-Edged paintings, while Dimension 2 reflected the relative separation of figure from ground in these paintings. Together these results show that untrained viewers can discern hierarchical complexity in paintings and that this quality stimulates affective responses and exploratory activity.

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THE INFLUENCE OF STORY, PLOT, AND GENRE ON MEMORY FOR ACTION IN A FILM
PAUL S. COWEN AND ALAIN LEBEL,
Abstract: This study compared recall of action in narrative film scenes that vary with regard to their necessity for the story, their typicality of the film's genre, and their function in the exposition or narrative development. These variables were dichotomized yielding a 2 x 2 x 2 design in which each of the eight combinations of the levels was represented by a specific scene. Recall of action was tested for each scene immediately after viewing the film and one week later. Scene that were necessary, typical, or that developed the narrative were recalled in greater detail but only narrative development significantly increased the probability of recalling a scene's key action. Atypical scenes were bettern recalled during exposition but typical scenes were better recalled during narrative development. There were no significant effects associated with delaying recall for one week, nor with the ordinal position or amout of information in a scene. Results suggest that as the narrative develops, an event schema takes precedence over generic scripts in processing story information. Results are also discussed in terms of a "Script pointer plus tag" model and it is suggested that plot and story may have different memory representations.

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THE INSTITUTIONAL DEFINITION OF POETRY: SOME HERETICAL THOUGHTS
DAVID FISHELOV,
Abstract: A few contemporary theories of poetry (e.g., Culler, 1975; Fish, 1980) claim that texts do not have any poet qualities prior to, and independently of, the institutional context in which they are presented. When a text, any text, is printed in verse form, in a book whose subtitle is "Poems," then we start looking for poetic qualities. And what we look for, we are bound to find. In order to challenge this approach, and to argue for the more objective, text-oriented approach to the categorization of texts (Hanaor, 1996; Miall & Kuiken, 1996), I have conducted a test. My test was based on two types of questionnaires, the one in prose form, the other in verse, in which students were asked to identify those texts that were "originally" poems or prose. The results obtained corroborate the assumption that readers have quite definite intuitions about the poetic qualities of texts prior to and independently of the way they are institutionally presented.

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