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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Characterizing the temporal profile of meaning-making with visual art

Dominik Welke¹, Edward A Vessel²; ¹Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, ²CUNY City College of NY

Presenter: Dominik Welke

Insight can play an important role in information processing and meaning making. A series of processes, from curiosity (drive state) to insight (uncertainty reduction) to pleasure (reward and reinforcement), might represent a fundamental epistemic arc for motivated learning. Here, we present a paradigm that combines measurements of curiosity, insight (aha), understanding and liking to outline the contours of this epistemic arc, employing the so-called ”title effect” – the fact that semantic information accompanying an artwork (such as titles) can spark insight and change how an observer understands and enjoys a piece of art. In an EEG and eye tracking study, we investigated how the different ratings were represented in the observers’ (neuro)physiological recordings. Using a time-resolved decoding approach, we were able to recover the graded ratings and track the temporal sequence of processing. Some correlates were found seconds after image onset, long after the time frames typically investigated in classical EEG studies.

Topic Area: Visual Processing & Computational Vision

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF