The role of similarity, sound and awareness in the appreciation of visual artwork via motor simulation.

One way to increase art appreciation is to create congruency between the actions performed by the artist and the actions performed by the viewer. Leder, Bar, and Topolinski (2012) successfully created such a link by asking participants to make either stroking or stippling motions while viewing stroke-style and pointillist-style paintings. We carried out a direct replication of Leder et al. (2012) in Experiment 1 but failed to reproduce their results. In Experiment 2, we achieved the desired cross-over interaction between image and action but only when the relationship was made more transparent. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this effect requires a motor component and cannot be reproduced by simply hearing the sounds associated with drawing production. Experiment 4 investigated whether either an external manipulation or a self-report measure of awareness of the image-action match modulated the liking ratings, in addition to artwork familiarity and participants' own hypotheses regarding the direction of the image-action effect. Participants who predicted that congruent relationships between what they saw and what they did would increase liking showed enhanced congruency effects. The links between historical production and contemporary exposure to art may then be an overt rather than covert process.