Research Information System
Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, no.9, pp.1-35, 2022 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
To what extent we could enjoy and appreciate anything that is totally unfamiliar?
Without any precedent whatsoever, no comprehension would be possible. Art students
gravitate to images they enjoy and this enjoyment might be partly due to an innate and
self–sustaining pleasure arising from viewing pictures. In the literature we find a
number of research studying the effects of such conditions as novelty, familiarity and
exposure on human perception, emotion, conscious or unconscious cognition, memory,
learning and etc. This research aimed to study the effects of such conditions on the
creativity of the students in a graduate painting studio setting where the students were
asked to complete two different painting projects of the same or related subject, one with
and the other without exposure to art historical examples. The results indicate that the
works carried out without exposure to examples turn out to be more creative and
original in a fundamental way than those realized after the exposure.