Impression Indicators from Realistic and Abstract Art Painting as Predictors of Verbal and Imaginative Creativity

The search for patterns in the perception and understanding of art is the subject of research in many scientific fields, including psychology and neurophysiology. In this paper, the analysis of the ratio of indicators of understanding and self-assessment of the emotional impression during the perception of specially selected painting of fine art representing realism and abstractionism is carried out in comparison with psychometrically measured indicators of originality during testing of verbal and non-verbal creativity. The study involved 115 university students aged 17–20 (60 man and 55 women). For a quantitative assessment of the aesthetic impression and the time of decision-making, a computerized program for presenting stimulus pictures was used. A significantly better understanding of the content of realistic paintings was established, which is accompanied by positive emotions and a longer time spent examining them in comparison with abstractionism (respectively, 4.0 and 3.6 s). According to the results of regression analysis, the predictors of verbal originality are the time of decision-making about the impression created when viewing realism, together with the indicator of conceptual thinking (according to the performance of the subtest of the intelligence verbal component, IQ4), and the predictor of figurative originality is the time of assessing the impression and the degree of understanding of abstract paintings. Consequently, the discovered patterns indicate not only the connection between self-assessment of aesthetic impression and psychometric realization of creative abilities, but also different mechanisms of their organization: with a relatively large contribution of conceptual thinking – to verbal creativity and imagination – to figurative.