The role of art knowledge training on aesthetic judgements and executive functions

The study of how we develop art knowledge can provide valuable insights into the underlying cognitive systems that support expertise and knowledge transfer to new contexts. An important and largely unanswered question is whether art knowledge training impacts subsequent judgements of artworks and executive functions. Across three pre-registered experiments (<i>N</i> > 630 total), which used a training intervention and Bayesian regression modelling, we explore whether art knowledge training impacts subsequent judgements of artworks and executive functions. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed an effect of art training on aesthetic judgements for trained but not untrained artworks. These training effects were generalized to unseen artworks produced by the same artist (Experiment 1) or another artist with a similar style (Experiment 2), but not to different art styles. Experiment 2 also showed that with larger training 'doses' (>16 minutes), the generalization effects are stronger. Experiment 3 showed invariance of the attentional network to art training versus non-art training, suggesting similar sensitivity of executive functions to different types of training. This work shines new light on the cognitive systems that support learning and generalization of learning to new contexts. Likewise, from an applied perspective, it emphasizes that learning and generalization can occur rapidly with a relatively short (approx. 16 minutes) training video.