Appreciating Ambiguity in Art: The effects of semantic distance and insight confidence on aesthetic appreciation

Previous work in psychology of aesthetics suggests that people tend to appreciate artworks they subjectively perceive as ambiguous. Yet ambiguity of an artwork is typically measured through viewers’ own ratings or qualitative measures which are well suited to within-person questions, but they do not, on their own, describe how much viewers disagree about what a work means. Defining ambiguity as the degree to which an artwork affords multiple interpretations, we introduce a computational, description-based measure that quantifies this multiplicity as the semantic distance between viewers’ descriptions. We complemented this with a metacognitive measure, insight confidence, which captures how confident viewers are in their own interpretations. We examined how these measures relate to aesthetic appreciation, operationalised as interest, emotional intensity, and cognitive affect. In an online study (N = 123), participants viewed artworks for 6 seconds and for each individual artwork either described them, rated their insight confidence and provided cognitive affect ratings, or they provided interest and emotional intensity ratings. Across artworks, those eliciting more divergent descriptions (greater semantic distance) received lower mean insight confidence. Contrary to preregistered predictions, such artworks also received lower aesthetic appreciation. These results indicate aesthetic appreciation is more strongly related to how certain a viewer is about what they are viewing rather than the degree of ambiguity of an artwork. Methodologically, the approach offers a way to quantify the divergence of open-ended verbal interpretations across viewers, alongside a measure of viewers' confidence in their own interpretation.