Perceived meaningfulness of semantically non-congruent stimuli increases in art context

The media occasionally reports instances where people mistake ordinary objects for art. This often happens in art galleries or museums and might suggest that people attribute meaning differently depending on whether the context is artistic or rooted in everyday life. In this manuscript, we investigate how people attribute meaning to seemingly nonsensical sentences and images when they believe they are made by poets or artists. We used a collection of sentences that conclude with semantically congruent and non-congruent words, and a collection of images where the object is either congruent or non-congruent with the background. We randomly assigned participants to the baseline and experimental (art) conditions, telling participants in the art condition that the sentences/images were created by artists. Studies 1 and 2 found that the art context increases the perceived meaningfulness of non-congruent sentences (“Most cats see well at court”), but not the congruent ones (“Most cats see well at night”), while Study 3 found a similar effect regarding non-congruent images (a lion in an office) and congruent images (a lion in a field). Additionally, we discuss how individual differences in aberrant salience and religiosity moderate the main effects of the art context on meaning-making. These results advance our theoretical understanding of how art contexts affect the interpretation of meaning and the importance of semantic non-congruency.