We Like What We Make

Straffon and colleagues found that “Self-made objects tend to be favoured, remembered, valued, and ranked above and beyond objects that are not related to the self. On this basis, we set out to test whether the effects of self-relevance would apply to visual art, and via what mechanisms. In three studies, participants created abstract paintings that were then incorporated in a dot-probe task, pairing self-made and other-made stimuli. Our findings confirm that attention and preference are higher for self-made (vs. other-made) artworks.”

Larissa Straffon, Georugina Agnew, Chenika Desch-Bailey, Evy van Berlo, Gosia Goclowska, and Mariska Kret.  “Visual Attention Bias for Self-Made Artworks.”  Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000451