A big part of experiencing art is talking about it. Sometimes (or, uh, frequently) artworks are successful because they provoke disagreement, and along with that disagreement, some good conversation. Because the participants in the Split Second online experiment weren’t communicating … Continue reading…

In the previous post I closed by noting that depending on what participants were asked to do, visual complexity could affect their ratings. Indeed, we found that the effect of complexity changed depending on the task completed before providing a … Continue reading…

Complexity is an important factor in the evaluation of art. In all of the previous Split Second blog posts I’ve talked about how the complexity of artworks dramatically affected participants’ reactions. But I never explained what, exactly, was meant by … Continue reading…

In previous Split Second blog posts, we looked at the effects of thin-slicing, textual information, and gender. Put another way, we were studying the effects of how long you look at the art, what sort of accompanying text there is, … Continue reading…

In the last blog post about Split Second, I talked about how adding extra information about a work changed what people thought about it. In general, adding information about a work causes ratings to increase. However, this isn’t the whole … Continue reading…

Last week I talked about our Split Second: Indian Paintings exhibition and Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In the previous post I described the first section of the online experiment we created for Split Second, … Continue reading…

A big inspiration for Split Second: Indian Paintings was the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink introduced the general public to the idea of “thin-slicing,” the notion that “decisions made very quickly can be … Continue reading…