The development of image understanding: Implications for visual literacy in older adolescents and young adults

The focus of the present empirical study has been on cognitive abilities necessary to the aesthetic understanding of art imagery and on their developmental patterns in older adolescents and young adults. The possibility of a sequence of distinct levels has been investigated, utilizing parameters of cognitive developmental level, age, expertise in visual arts and contextual variations. Middle school, high school, and college students were given a twelve-item Aesthetic Development Measure constructed for the purposes of this study and including a variety of objective and semi-objective tasks in judging images by known artists, including two portraits by Cindy Sherman. Questions were constructed in forced-choice format, according to criteria from an existing model of aesthetic development (Parsons, 1987). Binary responses were analyzed through a logistic regression model including all parameters. Performance of college students in art-related majors was compared to that of non-art majors, as well as correlated to performance on a standardized cognitive development measure, the Arlin Test of Formal Operations (ATFR). Contextual variations included presenting image-related questions in order of increasing difficulty or in randomized order.; Analyses revealed important contributions to aesthetic development from exposure to the visual arts and age. Older students generally performed better than younger ones, indicating the possibility of a maturation component in aesthetic cognition. Overall, formal reasoning did not seem to be highly related to performance on the image judgment tasks, although certain components of formal reasoning did relate to particular types of tasks. Students of all ages with levels of art expertise higher than those of their peers performed significantly better in the image judgment tasks. This finding, also supported by previous research in the area, was taken as evidence for the importance of domain-specific knowledge and motivation in determining aesthetic development. The hypothesis of a fixed level sequence in aesthetic development was partially confirmed, with specific tasks of aesthetic judgment ranking reliably as relatively easier and others as relatively more difficult. The implication that certain aesthetic skills build upon others in a course of domain-specific development is discussed, along with possible topics for further investigation in the area of developmental aesthetics.