The de-installed former Arts of the Islamic World gallery, May 2013.

We will do our best to keep you updated about the project and how it will affect movement around the Museum with signage. We have already cleared all objects from the former Arts of the Islamic World gallery, and soon you’ll get a behind-the-scenes peek at the project. Objects from the two collections will be on view on storage shelves in that space starting in mid-June. During the first phase of construction, you will be able to walk through this storage area while the adjacent galleries are dark.

This large-scale reinstallation project has also allowed us to collaborate with the Rubin Museum of Art. Museum-goers can see highlights of Asian art from Brooklyn across the East River in the exhibition From India East: Sculptures of Devotion from the Brooklyn Museum, which runs through July 14, 2014. We hope that you will head to Chelsea to learn more about the development of Buddhist and Hindu art across Asia during our temporary closure of the galleries here.

From India East is on view at the Rubin Museum through July 7, 2014 and features Brooklyn Museum objects.

More to come as our opening date gets closer, but we are looking forward to the new galleries. We hope to bring out objects from storage that we couldn’t show in the current galleries, such as Southeast Asian bronzes that require climate control, Japanese scrolls that are too long for the current casework, and an increased number of works on paper from across Asia and the Middle East. It’s a busy but exciting time in my department!

Visitors were invited to take the online activity using kiosks in the gallery, so the data could be compared. 2600 visitors sat down at the kiosks to take the activity for a spin.

You may remember from an earlier post, even though part of the project took place online, we were surprised to see a mostly local audience taking part.  Overall, that local audience spent an average of 15 minutes completing the online activity (as opposed to the general average of 7 minutes).  In the gallery, our visitors spent an average of 4 minutes 18 seconds completing the activity at the kiosks.  Even though they spent less time doing the activity, the average ratings per person were quite similar:  online – 39.1 vs. gallery – 36.7. Also, the in-gallery vs. online completion rates were very similar, which suggests a highly focused visitor consuming content at the kiosks very quickly.  Here are a few charts to show off some of the online vs. in-gallery differences.

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When it came to some of the data that Beau’s been delving into, he ran a comparison of in-gallery versus online data and found his original findings still held:

• No correlation between experience and time spent.
• Slight negative correlation between rating and birth-year. i.e. older people give slightly higher ratings.
• Women rank things slightly higher than men.
• Slight positive correlation between rating and experience, but women consistently rate themselves as being more experienced, so it’s hard to tell whether the aforementioned correlation is caused by experience or gender or what.
• Older people tend to self-identify as slightly more experienced.
• Complexity and information findings still hold.
• Engagement and rating variance, the finding also still holds, though there is an interesting change. In the gallery, rating variance tended to be much higher than online. For the control task, online variance was 520.6, while in-gallery variance was 668.5. For the free task, online variance was 459.1, while in-gallery variance was 510.1. So we’re still seeing massive reductions in variance, but the variance in the gallery was higher to begin with.
• Adding information, the finding still holds, though in the gallery the increase in ratings was not quite as big. (The muting of this effect might be related to the age/mean rating issue discussed above.)

Intoxicated Lady at a Window, late 18th century. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 13 3/4 x 11 3/8 in. (34.9 x 28.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Walzer, 79.285.

Beau also took a look at the rankings data and found, for the most part, the same works win and lose.  As he notes, “There are some minor upsets, and a few things which might be worth a story. In particular, Intoxicated Lady at a Window seemed to always do quite a bit worse in the gallery than online.”  While we are not totally sure why this painting didn’t do so well in the gallery, it’s interesting to note that this was the image that the New York Times used when the project was first announced.  It’s very possible that we had an information cascade happen online with participants rating this work higher because they might have been more familiar with it. This is one case where the in-gallery metrics might actually be more accurate and it shows just how delicate subconscious effects may be.

As Joan mentioned in one of her posts, Split Second closes at the end of the year.  If you have not managed to see it in the gallery, we hope you can come take a visit because the show will be gone in the blink of an eye.

The original intent of the Split Second experiment was to measure people’s reactions to works of art as they encountered 1) objects that varied in degrees of complexity and 2) viewing situations that varied by time of exposure or degree of engagement. In theory the experiment could have used almost any type of art, and participants would have behaved in the same ways whether they were looking at Japanese prints, or Goya etchings, or Plains Indian ledger drawings.  After looking at the outcome I have to say that I’m not totally sure that we would have gotten the same patterns of response for different genres or traditions of art.  I think the fact that we used Indian paintings affected the outcome and here’s why:

First let me say that I wasn’t one bit surprised that people liked the objects better after they were given some information about them. My first experience of Indian art could best be described as “love at first sight” but I know that was unusual. The vast majority of people can’t get comfortable with an image of a guy with an elephant head and extra arms  —no matter how gorgeous—until they know why he has that head and what those extra arms mean.  When we ask visitors what they liked or disliked about installations of Indian art they almost always assess the quality and quantity of the information we offered first and then talk about the beauty or selection of the art as a very secondary concern. I am pretty sure that this is not the case when the same people are asked their opinion of displays of Western art, particularly paintings.

I have to wonder whether there would have been a marked difference in reaction to the same object in informed versus uninformed viewing experiences if we had used American still life paintings or French landscapes.  I think that the unfamiliarity of Indian painting—which I cited as a good quality for the project in my last blog—led to more dramatic results in the informed/uninformed section of the experiment.

The other place where I think our use of Indian paintings affected the data was in the complexity issue. I was initially really surprised that complex images rated as highly as they did in the split second viewing.  Advertisers know that you can grab people’s attention in an instant using big, bold graphics and a simple message.  I would have thought that the more brightly colored images with less going on would have rated higher because people could take them in quickly.  But the opposite was true.  Straight-forward, easily legible images like this one didn’t do very well at all (in fact it was among the least popular)…

Nayika Awaits Her Lover (Rajasthan, Bikaner), 1692. Anonymous Gift, 81.192.3.

…while very complex images with more than one focal point fared very well despite the fact that there was no way people could take in all the info in 4 seconds. Here’s an example of one that did really well:

Krishna and Radha Under a Tree in a Storm (Punjab Hills, Kangra), c.1800. Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, 70.145.1. (Punjab Hills, Kangra), c.1800. Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, 70.145.1.

I think the preference for complexity comes from the fact that participants knew they were rating art, and people have different criteria for judging art than they do for other means of communication.  Even in an age when conceptual art and minimalism are part of the canon, I think a lot of people retain an old-fashioned preference for art that looks like it took some effort to create.  And I would argue that this is particularly true among those who know even a little bit about Indian art: people expect Indian art to display virtuoso craftsmanship and lots of elaborate detailing. So participants—consciously or not— gravitated toward objects that looked the way they thought Indian art should look.  Again, I have to wonder if complexity would have been as popular if participants were judging British portraiture or Greek sculpture.

People have asked me if the results of the Split Second experiment will change anything about the way I present works of art in the galleries and I have to say that the answer is probably no.  Mostly that’s because I’m not trying to sell anything in the galleries.  I’m not in the business of giving people what they like.  I’m in the business of informing people and of introducing them to things that they haven’t seen before.  Obviously we want the art to look as beautiful as possible, and if visitors leave the galleries feeling that they like the art, that’s great, but that’s not the only response I’m hoping for.

One of the most universally rejected paintings in the Split Second experiment is also one of the most significant from a historical and even political vantage point:

A Maid’s Words to Radha, from a manuscript of the Rasikapriya. Central India, 1634. Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc., 86.227.51.

This painting comes from a manuscript that is important to art historians because it can be dated to a precise year (most early Indian paintings cannot) so it serves as a landmark for dating all other paintings of its type. It’s also in a style that one very influential Indian art historian promoted and popularized as “quintessentially Indian,” a designation that was particularly important in the first half of the twentieth century as India was struggling to gain independence and to re-establish its own traditional culture after centuries of change brought by foreign conquerors.  I’m hoping that these facts enhance your interest in the painting, but I’m guessing that they don’t make you like the painting any more than you did before.  Because the truth is that it’s kind of crudely painted and you either appreciate its rough simplicity or you don’t.  But the fact that you didn’t like it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop showing it in the gallery.

The one place where we want to give people art that they can instantly like (or at least find engaging) is in choosing the images we use for our advertising.  Maybe the results of Split Second can give us some insight into the kinds of Indian paintings we choose for promotional materials in the future. Those images can get people into the galleries and then I’ll take it from there.

I’ve been silent so far because the analysis of the results is really a matter for someone with a more statistical bent.  But since the project assessed the perception of works of art there might as well be a little discussion of the art we used.  I’m going to give you a little background info here and then later I’ll talk about my responses to the data we gathered.

First of all, a plug: the exhibition closes December 31, so I encourage you to get to the Museum before that.  The paintings are really wonderful and won’t be on view again for a while because they’re light sensitive. We’ve got some serious masterpieces on view.  This one in particular is a show-stopper, made by a team of the best artists in India for an emperor who spared no expense:

Led by Songhur Balkhi and Lulu the Spy, the Ayyars Slit the Throats of Prison Guards and Free Sa'id Farrukh-Nizhad, page from a Hamza Nama manuscript. Imperial Mughal school, 1562-77. Museum Collection Fund, 24.46.

If you come to see the paintings in person I think you’ll be surprised.  They’re definitely not as flat as they seem on a computer screen and they’re all different sizes—something you just don’t comprehend when you look at reproductions, even if the dimensions are listed.  This painting, for instance, is the size of a subway poster (for a train not a station) while most of the others are more the size of a page in a coffee table book or even smaller. In many cases, you can see the exquisitely painted details far better in person.  So hurry over!

Let me tell you a little about why we chose Indian paintings in the first place.  First of all there are the nuts-and-bolts reasons: we have a lot of high-quality Indian paintings in the Brooklyn Museum collection and all of them had been photographed in color thanks to a big digital capture project we did a couple of years ago.  It also seemed like a nice complement to, and subtle promo for, the big Vishnu exhibition, which was going to be on view for much of the same period as the Split Second installation (Vishnu closed in October).

Then there are the more intellectual reasons: Indian paintings are basically flat, and they are unfamiliar territory for much of our audience.  Flat is good because photographic reproductions of flat objects are more straight-forward and uniform than photographs of three-dimensional objects.  We were worried that variable factors like background color and dramatic lighting would influence participant reactions to photos of teapots or scarabs.  There are variables in the photography of Indian painting—whether one uses raking light to pick up the glint of metallic paint, whether one includes all or some or none of the border that appears around most Indian paintings—but they’re not as significant as those for photography of 3D objects.

Unfamiliar is good because we wanted people to come to the material with fresh eyes and few preconceptions.  We didn’t want them to recognize masterpieces or famous artists and rate them more highly because they felt like they should.  We had people describe their level of expertise or familiarity with Indian art before doing the experiment and most were complete newcomers.

There is one way in which Indian paintings were inappropriate material for a split-second experiment: these paintings definitely weren’t designed to be glimpsed quickly.  “In your face” impact isn’t a quality many of them were supposed to have. With the exception of the oversized painting illustrated here, they were all gathered or bound into manuscripts; their aristocratic owners held them in their hands or on a table. In intimate groups or solo, the viewers went slowly through the pages, looking at the paintings as a form of entertainment. Book illustrations require a different style and approach to image-making than wall-hung paintings that might be seen from across the room. The many tiny details that you can find in Indian manuscript paintings are a result of their relatively small size, but they are due even more to the practice of looking at manuscripts closely and at length: the artist wanted the viewer to have plenty to look at, to make new discoveries every time he or she opened the book.  So these illustrations were rarely judged on their ability to make a split-second impression—until now!

To measure contentiousness, we looked at the variance of the ratings for each work. If most participants gave a work roughly the same rating, then it’s safe to say that work is not contentious. However, if participants disagree, if there’s a large amount of variance in the ratings, then that work might be contentious. (I say “might” for a good reason: while high variance of ratings may indicate disagreement, it could also simply indicate confusion. I’ll come back to this later.)

In Split Second Stats #4: Engagement we found that certain tasks in the experiment had a strong effect on the variance of ratings. This is important because it indicates that the context of presentation and the way participants engage with a work can change the variance. Here, however, we’ll take a look at how variance and contentiousness were related to specific properties of the works themselves. All of the analyses below apply to the unlimited time experimental tasks only.

As in many of the analyses described in previous blog posts, complexity played a big role here. We found that as paintings got more complex, they became less contentious. That is, we found a negative correlation between complexity and variance (cor = -.35, p = 0.03). This is not too surprising: we found previously that when time was unlimited, people tend to rate complex paintings very well, a finding which already implies inter-participant agreement. A more puzzling finding concerned color: The higher the overall saturation of the colors in a work, the higher the variance (cor = .42, p < 0.01). One possible, but entirely speculative, explanation for this effect is that one large group of our participants reacted very positively to highly saturated color palettes, which another large group reacted very negatively. Similarly, we found that the larger the frame of the painting, the more variance in ratings. This again might suggest (speculatively!) a division of the participant population into two groups: those that found large frames interesting, and those that found them to get in the way of the work.

Some of the strongest effects concerning variance were not clearly related to quantifiable properties of the works themselves. One very strong, reliable finding was that as the average amount of time participants spend looking at a work increased, the variance of the ratings of that work decreased (cor = -.47, p = 0.002). That is, the more time was spent looking at a work, the more our participants tended to agree about how to rate it. Though this finding seems to push against the gist of the thin slicing theory, it also seems like an encouraging experimental result: in order to get people to agree about art, you just need to get them to hold still and look at it for a long time. However, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. People decide for themselves whether or not they want to spend a long time looking at an artwork. This finding lets us know that when our participants spent that time, they tended to agree, but it doesn’t tell us why they decided to spend their time in the first place. There is also a cause-and-effect problem: it could be that the decreasing variance and the increasing time are themselves caused by a third factor we didn’t measure. (Though complexity looks like it may account for some of this effect, it certainly doesn’t account for all of it.)

Indian. Utka Nayika, late 18th century. Opaque watercolor on paper, sheet: 9 13/16 x 7 9/16 in. (24.9 x 19.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, 36.241

Finally, we found that some of the works in the experiment were simply contentious on their own terms. The most contentious object, Utka Nayika (pictured above), is unfinished. Though we have no quantifiable measure that points toward it being an unfinished work, it seems like a safe bet that this peculiarity accounts for the high variance in participants’ ratings. As I mentioned before, it’s important to differentiate between contentiousness and confusion. We can identify this work as being truly contentious, and not simply confusing, by looking at a histogram showing how it was rated.

In the case of a work which was simply confusing, we would expect a uniform distribution of ratings, where any one rating was as likely to occur as any other. Instead, what we see here are distinct peaks and valleys. There are small peaks around 25 and 100, and larger peaks around 50 and 75. This indicates participants’ opinions about the work split them into at least three groups: those who did not like it (the peak at 25), those who were decidedly indifferent (the peak at 50), and those who liked it a lot (the peaks at 75 and 100). A similar situation can be seen in the rankings histogram for the second most contentious object, The Bismillah, a work which is distinguished by its calligraphic, non-representational nature:

Indian. The Bismillah, 1875-1900. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 19 5/8 x 11 13/16 in. (49.8 x 30.0 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Philip P. Weisberg, 59.206.8

In both of these cases, symbolic factors not accounted for by our experimental model had an extremely strong effect on the results, strongly suggesting a direction for further research. As interesting as it is to see the symbolic world bursting out of our tightly constrained experimental framework, it’s not surprising: we are, after all, looking at art.

Recto, normal illumination, before treatment. Portrait of a Man, 19th century. Opaque watercolor on paper, with frame: 21 1/4 x 17 1/4 x 1 1/4 in. (54 x 43.8 x 3.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Dr. Bertram H. Schaffner, 2010.48.60

Following the identification of its materials, a condition assessment was carried out with the aid of a stereomicroscope (for low magnification) and illumination techniques to accentuate features of the piece that are not visible in plain sight.

Detail of upper recto, raking illumination, before treatment. Portrait of a Man (2010.48.60)

At the time of condition assessment, the piece was in poor condition. There were dents and abrasions, but the most disfiguring problem was an uneven, yellowed coating on the image. While the coating was thin and spotty in some areas, it was thick and cracked in others. I took a look under the stereomicroscope and noticed that this coating was strong and had pulled up pigment with it where it was cupped and cracked, mainly on the upper right corner. In addition extraneous white fibers attached to the surface coating were visible throughout the image and can clearly be seen in raking illumination (light source coming from one side). It is thought these fibers became entrapped during a previous and unsuccessful restoration attempt to swell and reduce the coating by rubbing it with cotton.

Recto, UVA-induced visible fluorescence, before treatment. Portrait of a Man (2010.48.60)

I also examined the piece under long-wave ultraviolet (UV-A) irradiation, which brings out other features that are not evident to the naked eye. A mottled orange-yellow fluorescence coincided with the yellowed coating that was visible in plain sight. Also, the upper right corner of the image was absorbant to UV-A irradiation, which is a common reaction of modern materials under UV-A. At this point, an educated guess made me believe that the fibers embedded in the surface and the loss of media (watercolor) and overpaint on the upper right corner were most likely the result of a failed attempt to remove the coating with cotton and restoring the color.

After discussing the treatment plan with the curator, Joan Cummins, it was decided that the main goal was to minimize only the most distracting damages affecting the readability of the image. I proceeded with chemical spot testing to determine the solubility of the coating.

Localized testing using 100% ethanol and 100% deionized water was done to test the solubility of the coating. The coating did not swell with ethanol; it swelled with deionized water. Since natural resins are insoluble in water and soluble in alcohol and other organic solvents, I could eliminate dammar or shellac as the coating. As the coating did swell with water, it suggested a gum or glue material. A tiny sample of the coating was taken for technical analysis with the Biuret test. The results indicated that the coating is protein-based and thus probably an animal glue (i.e. adhesive derived from animal tissues). Ironically, water can also solubilize the gum Arabic binder in watercolors. This represented a limiting factor for removing the fibers on the surface as well as reducing the thicker and discolored areas of the coating. However, the application of a small amount of water would not disturb the original media if readily blotted from the surface. I brushed deionized water on the white fibers, removed them with a dry brush, and lightly blotted the surface.

Recto, normal illumination, after treatment. Portrait of a Man, 19th century. Opaque watercolor on paper, with frame: 21 1/4 x 17 1/4 x 1 1/4 in. (54 x 43.8 x 3.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Dr. Bertram H. Schaffner, 2010.48.60

The small areas showing flaking of the paint layer needed to be secure in place and flattened as much as possible before reducing the coating. I applied a suitable consolidant (an adhesive) under the flaking coating and carefully flattened the cupped and cracked areas with a microspatula. When the paint was reattached and secure, I thinned the areas of thick coating mechanically using a scalpel, while viewing under the stereomicroscope. Our main goal was accomplished, making way for the completion of other steps in this treatment, like mending minor tears, and filling and inpainting small losses of support.

Portrait of a Man will be on view until May 2012, so don’t miss the rotation!

In the time-limited, Split Second task, we found various attributes of the frame of a painting had strong effects on how that painting was rated. The strongest effect was caused by the frame size, where bigger frames resulted in lower ratings. However, we also found that the surface complexity of the frame had a positive effect on ratings (cor = 0.19, p = 0.014). This effect was smaller, but definitely significant.

Indian. Krishna and Balarama on Their way to Mathura, Folio from a Dispersed Bhagavata Purana Series, ca. 1725. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 9 1/2 x 12 in. (24.1 x 30.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Manheim, 69.125.4

A major goal of this experiment was coming up with some preliminary answers to the question of what, exactly, is factored into a split-second judgment. When we make judgments in time-limited contexts, we’re not able to make a thorough survey of the thing we’re judging. Instead we produce a judgment based on a number of subconscious processes which may be affected by more than the thing itself. In this particular case, we were interested in knowing whether the complexity of the frame was affecting conscious, systematic judgments, or was operating on a subconscious level.

To answer this question, we looked at how the complexity of the frame affected ratings in all of the other tasks. In the time-unlimited control task, where participants were given as much time as they liked to rate a work without being asked to do anything else, the frame complexity effect disappeared completely. That is, when people were allowed to take a thorough look at a work, the complexity of its frame did not affect their judgment. This was also true for all of the engagement tasks, which makes sense because those tasks require participants to take a systematic approach to evaluating each work’s surface.

In the time-unlimited Think tasks, where participants read information about the work, the frame complexity effect returned. That is, when participants paid attention to information about the painting, their judgment was again affected by the complexity of the frame. This suggests that attention paid to curatorial labels was also attention shifted from the work itself, and that this shift allowed certain aspects of the work to have a subconscious effect which would not occur in other circumstances. This effect was strongest when the full curatorial label was added (cor = 0.4, p = 0.01).

This finding is important from an exhibition design perspective. Curatorial interventions in the gallery space are always engaged in a kind of struggle with the art itself for spectator attention. Depending on how the attention of the spectator is focused, certain properties of artworks may be activated or suppressed. Some of these properties, such as the complexity of the frame, may only be activated when viewer attention is diverted or split in some way. A key aspect of the role of the curator is awareness of and sensitivity to the complex interdependencies between in-gallery interventions and various properties of the works. This experiment suggests an analysis of these interdependencies in terms of attention management: for any given curatorial intervention, how is attention diverted or split, and how does that activate or suppress properties of the work itself?

There are lots of ways a work of art could be complex. Complexity could be a function of the visual surface of a work, as in the arrangement of contrasting elements within it, or of things outside of it, as in the network of references pointed to by its content. Complexity could also come from a connection between the work and the viewer, as in the use of multiple perspective or other perceptual effects, or the viewer’s specific, personal relationship to a given historical context. Further complicating the situation, when people talk about a work being “complex” they usually don’t refer to only one of these possibilities—a complex work of art is rarely complex in just one way.

Indian. King Solomon and His Court, 1875-1900. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 19 11/16 x 11 7/8 in. (50.0 x 30.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of James S. Hays, 59.205.16

When approaching the study of complexity (or any subjective idea) from a scientific perspective, its necessary to pick a one of two approaches. The first approach is to pick a specific way of quantifying the idea. This is always painful, because it means the implicit rejection of other approaches which may be really important to the feel of the idea. The second approach is to ask lots of people what they think—rather than trying to quantify the idea itself, you quantify peoples’ judgments about the idea. The problem with this approach is that it often requires an extra experiment in order to quantify those judgments before you can even get started working on the question you’re really interested in.

We chose the first approach. Rather than studying the complex, subjective idea of complexity, we decided to focus on one specific, measurable type of complexity, which could be called “surface complexity.” We were interested in how much was going on in a work without considering its content. For example, a work with a busier visual surface (with more dots, lines, curves, scratches, brush strokes, marks, etc.) would have greater surface complexity than a work with just a few lines, a couple of repeating patterns, and lots of open space.

Indian. Portrait of Rao Chattar Sal of Bundi, ca. 1675. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 7 5/16 x 4 11/16 in. (18.6 x 11.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Amy and Robert L. Poster, 82.227.1

This can be confusing, because it doesn’t necessarily match up with a normal idea of what complexity means. An image which is just a big field of scratches might have a much higher surface complexity than an intricate portrait—it just depends on how they were both painted, i.e. what’s happening on the surface of the work, ignoring its content.

Indian. Nanda Requests a Horoscope for Krishna, Page from a Bhagavata Purana series, ca. 1725. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 9 1/8 x 10 1/2 in. (23.2 x 26.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Poster, 78.260.5

We quantified the surface complexity of an image in terms of the amount of data a computer needs to store in order to recreate it. That is, if one could describe the form of an image in one sentence, it would be less complex than an image requiring ten sentences. Because we were working with digital files, this approach was quite convenient: the surface complexity of an image corresponds exactly to that image’s file size after compression. The bigger the compressed file size, the more complex the image. Specifically, we used the ratio of the file size of the image to the number of pixels, allowing us to compare images with different dimensions.

One of the most interesting things we found out about surface complexity was that it variably affects participants’ reactions to artworks depending on what task they were completing. This means that what people were doing and paying attention to affects their reaction to complexity. Based on our results, we speculate that during certain tasks, complexity has a profound subconscious effect on participants’ reactions. I’ll discuss this in more detail in the next post!

In this task, participants were split up in groups. Each group was asked to perform a specific task which required them to engage with the content of the work they were looking at. The tasks were as follows:

• Counting: Type in the number of figures in the work.
• Description: Describe the work in your own words.
• Color: Name the dominant color in the work.
• Free association: Type the first thing that comes to mind when looking at the work.
• Tagging: Type a single word which describes the subject or mood of the work.
• No task: our control group, as described in our first stats blog post.

I expected that after completing any of these tasks participants would have a stronger emotional connection to the work, so the average rating would go up. Surprisingly, this was not the case. None of the engagement tasks had a statistically significant effect on average rating. Our curator Joan Cummins was not surprised by this, saying that curatorial interventions such as engagement tasks were not intended to make people enjoy the work more, but to get them to learn about it.

However, though the engagement tasks did not affect the average rating, they did affect the way ratings were distributed, i.e. how all of the participants’ ratings were spread out around the scale. We found that when participants completed an engagement task, their ratings clustered much more tightly together. In statistical terms, engagement tasks reduced the variance of the ratings. This means that, though engagement tasks don’t make people like things more, they make people’s ratings more consistent, or increase agreement about a work across the whole population of participants.

Indian. Episode Surrounding the Birth of Krishna, Page from a Dispersed Bhagavata Purana Series, late 17th-early 18th century. Opaque watercolor on paper, sheet: 10 1/8 x 15 15/16 in. (25.7 x 40.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Emily Manheim Goldman, 1991.180.10

Also surprising to me was which task reduced the variance the most. I expected that the description or tagging tasks would create the most agreement across participants, because they require people to evaluate what’s being portrayed in the work in linguistic terms. However, the counting task reduced variance the most, followed by the color and free-response tags (a tie for second place), then tagging, with the description task coming in dead last. We’ve speculated that this may be because of how the various tasks manipulated conscious attention—the description task focuses conscious attention on the content of the painting, whereas the counting task focuses your conscious attention on a more-or-less objective formal property (the number of figures).

Why, exactly, this would reduce variance is unclear. It may be because focusing on form instead of content means people don’t pay attention to things that might otherwise affect their rating of the painting, e.g. controversial subject matter. It may also create a situation where evaluation of the quality of the painting (as opposed to evaluate of its form) is passed along to the subconscious, and that (to extend Gladwell’s thin-slicing hypothesis) subconscious judgments may naturally tend to have less variance. This suggests yet another interesting direction for further research.