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Perceived meaningfulness of semantically noncongruent stimuli increases in art context
Iosifyan, Marina Wolfe, Judith
Iosifyan, Marina
Wolfe, Judith
Author
Abstract
The media occasionally report instances where people mistake ordinary objects for art. This often happens in art galleries or museums and might suggest that people attribute meaning differently depending on whether the context is artistic or rooted in everyday life. In this manuscript, we investigate how people attribute meaning to seemingly nonsensical sentences and images when they believe they are made by poets or artists. We used a collection of sentences that conclude with semantically congruent and noncongruent words, and a collection of images where the object is either congruent or noncongruent with the background. We randomly assigned participants to the baseline and experimental (art) conditions, telling participants in the art condition that the sentences/images were created by artists. Studies 1 and 2 found that the art context increases the perceived meaningfulness of noncongruent sentences (‘Most cats see well at court’), but not the congruent ones (‘Most cats see well at night’), while Study 3 found a similar effect regarding noncongruent images (a lion in an office) and congruent images (a lion in a field). Additionally, we discuss how individual differences in aberrant salience and religiosity moderate the main effects of the art context on meaning-making. These results advance our theoretical understanding of how art contexts affect the interpretation of meaning and the importance of semantic noncongruency.
Keywords
art, context, meaning, noncongruency, semantics
Date
2025
Type
Journal article
Journal
Art and Perception
Book
Volume
13
Issue
Page Range
1-24
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Faculty of Theology and Philosophy
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© Marina Iosifyan and Judith Wolfe, 2024.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).