A Measure of the Information Content of Visual Art Stimuli for Studies in Experimental Aesthetics

This study was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of Mehrabian and Russell's Information Rate Scale (IRS) for measuring the information content of paintings. Forty-eight subjects, including an equal number of art-trained and untrained male and female undergraduates, rated sixteen twentieth-century paintings on each of the fourteen IRS adjective pairs and for “interest” and “pleasure.” Factor analyses performed on all rating data revealed that the information rate score, which is the sum of ratings for all IRS items, provides a measure of the complexity of art stimuli that reflects the collative nature of this property. Specifically, it was found that items reflecting both physical and statistical properties of a composition (e.g., simple-complex; redundant-varied) and viewer “familiarity” with the content of a composition (e.g., common-rare; familiar-novel) were correlates of the information rate score. This value was significantly influenced by a painting's style but not by subjects' gender, training, or aesthetic judgments of it. Results constitute evidence that the IRS is a potentially powerful tool for the quantification and analysis of the information content of visual art stimuli.