Dynamic Evaluation of High- and Low-Creativity Drawings by Artist and Nonartist Raters: Replication and Methodological Extension

• Published in: Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts creativity, and the arts, 2011-11, Vol.5 (4), p.350-359
• Main Authors: Serafin, Joanna, Kozbelt, Aaron, Seidel, Angelika, Dolese, Melissa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Artists; Creativity; Female; Human; Judgment; Male
• ISSN: 1931-3896; 1931-390X
• DOI: 10.1037/a0023587

How do creators evaluate works-in-progress to guide them to successful completion? To study this process, artist and nonartist raters assessed in-progress states of high- and low-quality emerging artworks. States were presented sequentially, as a methodological variant to previous research using random order presentation. Results for nonartists replicated earlier findings of a reliably shallower slope for the quality trajectories of high-quality drawings, as defined by artists. Results for artists were more complex; ratings of artists with different aesthetic judgment criteria were examined separately. Artists not valuing abstraction showed mostly similar results as nonartist raters. Inconsistent with earlier findings, abstraction-valuing showed no difference in high- versus low-quality drawings' trajectory slopes. Analyses of time-quality correlations for individual raters suggest abstraction-valuing artists gave lower ratings to later stages of low-quality drawings, producing null effects for slope. This implies that although sequential presentation may be more ecologically valid, random presentation yields results which allow better inferences as to the differences in the creative process.