The Role of Art Knowledge Training on Aesthetic Judgements and Executive Functions

The study of how we develop art knowledge can provide valuable insight into the structure of underlying cognitive systems that support art expertise and knowledge transfer to new contexts. An important question that is left largely unanswered is the extent to which art knowledge training impacts subsequent judgements of artworks and executive functions. Across three pre-registered experiments (N > 630 in total), which used a training intervention paradigm and multi-level Bayesian modelling approaches, we explore the ways in which art knowledge training impacts subsequent judgements of artworks and executive functions. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed an effect of art knowledge training on a range of aesthetic judgements for trained but not untrained artworks. These effects of training generalised to unseen artworks produced by the same artist (Exp. 1) or another artist with a similar style (Exp. 2), but not to different styles of visual art. Experiment 2 also showed that with larger training “doses” (>16 minutes of training), the effects of art training are larger, and the generalisation effects are stronger. Experiment 3 showed invariance of the attentional network to art training vs. non-art training, suggesting similar sensitivity of executive functions of attention to different kinds of training. These findings highlight that art knowledge shapes judgements of artworks and that art and non-art knowledge development have a similar impact on executive functions. This work shines new light on the cognitive systems that support learning and generalisation of learning to new contexts. Likewise, from an applied perspective, our research emphasises that learning and generalisation effects can occur rapidly with a freely available and relatively short (~16 minutes) training video.