Interestingness and Pleasingness of Drawings from Different Age and Expertise Groups

Abstract

Student groups with different levels of art expertise (art students and psychology students) judged a collection of drawings produced by people from different age and expertise groups (5-, 8-, 11-, and 14-year-old children, and adult artists and non-artists). Three assessment criteria were used, namely “interestingness,” “pleasingness,” and “overall quality” (good-poor). Previous studies had demonstrated that art experts value drawings by the youngest children and artists more highly than drawings from the other groups. In other words, they produce more U-curve appreciation patterns. Here we show that unlike in the case of naïve students, the mean judgment pattern of art experts for the criteria pleasingness and interestingness indeed form a U-curve. Furthermore, expert judges exhibited greater interdependence than naïve judges in their ratings of pleasingness and interestingness. The results are discussed in relation to contemporary models of aesthetic judgment.