Knowledge-Based Assessment of Expertise in the Arts:
Exploring Aesthetic Fluency

Paul J. Silvia
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Scientific interest in expertise in the arts is growing, but measures of expertise have largely been brief
and informal. The present research examines Smith and Smith’s (2006) Aesthetic fluency scale, which
measures expertise by assessing domain knowledge in the arts. A latent variable study examined
Aesthetic fluency in relation to fluid intelligence and the Big Five dimensions of personality. Openness
to experience had a large effect, and all other effects were small. Aesthetic fluency appears to be
associated with the artistic values and interests typical of people high in openness to experience.

Keywords: Aesthetic fluency, expertise, Aesthetics, openness to experience, assessment

Experts and novices perceive, evaluate, create, and experience
art differently (e.g., Axelsson, 2007; Kozbelt & Seeley, 2007), and
scientific interest in artistic expertise is growing (Locher, 2007). A
straightforward way to study expertise is to recruit groups of
novices and experts. For many questions, however, researchers
need a continuous measure of expertise. In longitudinal research,
for example, it is more typical to estimate growth on a continuum
than to estimate transitions between categories. And in individual-
differences research, researchers are usually interested in variation
along a construct’s full range, not just in a construct’s extremes.

Continuous measures of expertise have typically been brief and
blunt, such as simply asking people how much training they have
had (e.g., Locher, Smith, & Smith, 2001; Silvia, 2006). A prom-
ising new method, however, measures expertise with a knowledge-
based approach. Smith and Smith’s (2006) Aesthetic fluency scale
presents figures and terms from art history, and respondents indi-
cate how much they know about each one. This scale has some
nice features: it emphasizes what people know about art (vs. how
much they like it or how good they are at it), and researchers can
adapt the scale for other domains by adding items (Silvia &
Barona, in press).

Given the youth of this approach, evidence for the scale’s
validity is preliminary but promising. In their study of museum
visitors, Smith and Smith (2006) found that people who visited
museums often and who had formal training in art had higher
Aesthetic fluency scores. A natural next step is to consider major
dimensions of personality and individual differences—what are

people high in Aesthetic fluency like? Locating Aesthetic fluency
within a network of other variables, particularly variables that have
been widely studied and are well understood, will refine the
construct’s meaning and expand the evidence for validity. The
present research thus explores Aesthetic fluency in relation to fluid
intelligence and the Big Five dimensions of personality.

Method

Participants

A sample of 226 university students (178 women, 48 men)
participated as part of a research option; most (82%) were 18 or 19
years old. The data were collected as part of a broader psycho-
metric study of creativity and cognition (see Silvia et al., in press,
for more details).

Procedure

People completed several measures of individual differences.
Aesthetic fluency was measured with Smith and Smith’s (2006)
Aesthetic fluency scale, which contains 10 items referring to
people and ideas in art history (Mary Cassatt, Isamu Noguchi,
John Singer Sargent, Alessandro Boticelli, Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
Fauvism, Egyptian Funerary Stelae, Impressionism, Chinese
Scrolls, Abstract Expressionism). To explore other domains, we
added five literary terms (Carl Sandburg, Language Poetry, The
Black Mountain School, Beat Writing, Confessional Poetry) and
five terms from the decorative arts (Alvar Aalto, Charles and Ray
Eames, Tapio Wirkkala, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd
Wright). People respond to each item on a 0 – 4 scale (0 � I have
never heard of this artist or term; 1 � I have heard of this but
don’t really know anything about it; 2 � I have a vague idea of
what this is; 3 � I understand this artist or idea when it is
discussed; 4 � I can talk intelligently about this artist or idea in
art). The original 10 items correlated highly with the literary items
(r � 0.52) and with the decorative arts items (r � 0.46); the latter
two correlated as well (r � 0.42).

The Big Five dimensions of personality—Neuroticism, Extra-
version, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscien-

These data are from the Creativity and Cognition project, which was
first described in Silvia et al. (in press). Chris Barona, Josh Cram, Karl
Hess, Jenna Martinez, and Crystal Richard deserve thanks for their help
with collecting data. Researchers interested in reanalyzing the data can
download the data files (in SPSS and Mplus formats) from the author’s
Web page.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul J.
Silvia, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 26170, University of North
Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402-6170. E-mail:
p_silvia@uncg.edu

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association
2007, Vol. 1, No. 4, 247–249 1931-3896/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1931-3896.1.4.247

247



tiousness—were measured with three scales: the 60-item NEO
Five Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992), the 50-item In-
ternational Personality Item Pool scale (Goldberg et al., 2006), and
a 10-item brief scale (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003). Each
scale used a 1 to 5 format. Fluid intelligence was measured with
the Ravens progressive matrices; a Letter Sets task, which in-
volved finding rules that distinguished groups of letters; and a
Paper Folding task, which involved deciding how sheets of paper
would appear if mentally unfolded.

We included two demographic predictors. The first was gender
(scored 1 for men, 2 for women). The second was whether peo-
ple’s college major was related to the arts, which reflects a com-
mitment to training in a creative field (see Silvia et al., in press).
People with arts majors—the visual arts (e.g., fine arts, art history),
performing arts (e.g., theater, music performance), or decorative
arts (e.g., fashion design, interior architecture)—received 1 point;
people with conventional majors (91% of the sample) received 0
points.

Results and Discussion

The Big Five factors, fluid intelligence, and Aesthetic fluency
were modeled as latent variables. The three self-report scales were
indicators for the Big Five factors, the three cognitive tasks were
indicators for fluid intelligence, and the three Aesthetic fluency
scores were indicators for Aesthetic fluency. Each latent factor’s
variance was fixed to 1. The analyses were conducted with Mplus
4.21 using full-information maximum-likelihood estimation. Table
1 presents descriptive statistics for the Aesthetic fluency items.

Aesthetic fluency was regressed on the Big Five factors, fluid
intelligence, the creativity of people’s college majors, and gender.
The fit of the model was acceptable (RMSEA � 0.076, SRMR �

0.073, CFI � 0.88, �2/df � 2.32, �2[196] � 454.79); measurement
models showed that the misfit stemmed from the Big Five scales.
Table 2 depicts the paths from the predictors to Aesthetic fluency.
The largest effect size—and the only large effect— belonged to
openness to experience (� � 0.553). Several small effects (�s
around 0.15) were found for extraversion, conscientiousness, and
gender. Neuroticism, agreeableness, and fluid intelligence were
essentially unrelated to Aesthetic fluency. The model explained
28.3% of the variance in Aesthetic fluency.

This study thus provides evidence for the validity of Smith and
Smith’s (2006) knowledge-based approach to measuring expertise
in the arts. People high in Aesthetic fluency were not generally
smarter; interestingly, they were also not more likely to have a
college major related to the arts. Instead, the broad factor of
openness to experience—a factor associated with Aesthetic inter-
ests, curiosity, unconventionality, and creativity (McCrae, 2007)—
strongly predicted people’s levels of Aesthetic fluency. This result
adds to the emerging view of openness as a general factor in
Aesthetics (McCrae, 2007) and in creativity (Silvia et al., in press),
and it suggests that people’s values and interests are central to
Aesthetic fluency. A limitation, of course, is that this study was a
cross-sectional analysis of young adults, most of whom were too
young to be true experts in the arts. The growth of expertise over
time remains a critical question for future research.

References

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Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) pro-
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Table 1
Descriptive Statistics for the Aesthetic Fluency Items

M Median Mode Minimum/Maximum SD � 1 2 3

1. Aesthetic fluency:
Original items

0.753 0.60 0.40 0.00/3.60 0.58 0.83 1

2. Aesthetic fluency:
Literary arts

0.798 0.60 0.60 0.00/2.80 0.67 0.66 0.52 1

3. Aesthetic fluency:
Decorative arts

0.391 0.20 0.00 0.00/3.40 0.55 0.67 0.46 0.42 1

Table 2
Predictors of Aesthetic Fluency

Standardized � z Value

Openness to experience 0.553 4.49
Extraversion �0.162 1.78
Neuroticism �0.037 0.45
Agreeableness 0.107 1.15
Conscientiousness �0.183 1.97
Fluid intelligence 0.025 0.25
Gender 0.153 1.79
Arts major �0.026 0.34

Note. n � 226. All variables are latent variables, except for gender and
creative college major.

248 BRIEF REPORTS



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to experience. Motivation and Emotion, 31, 5–11.

Silvia, P. J. (2006). Artistic training and interest in visual art: Applying the
appraisal model of aesthetic emotions. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 24,
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Silvia, P. J., & Barona, C. M. (in press). Do people prefer curved objects?
Angularity, expertise, and aesthetic preference. Empirical Studies of the
Arts.

Silvia, P. J., Winterstein, B. P., Willse, J. T., Barona, C. M., Cram, J. T.,
Hess, K. I., et al. (in press). Assessing creativity with divergent thinking

tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring
methods. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Smith, L. F., & Smith, J. K. (2006). The nature and growth of aesthetic
fluency. In P. Locher, C. Martindale, & L. Dorfman (Eds.), New direc-
tions in aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (pp. 47–58). Amityville, NY:
Baywood.

Received June 11, 2007
Revision received August 2, 2007

Accepted August 2, 2007 �

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