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In order to accurately study in situ aesthetic responses as participants explore gallery spaces and museum exhibitions, we need a way to comprehensively, exhaustively, and precisely classify the behaviors displayed in such settings. We have restructured and extended a preliminary taxonomy of museum navigation behavior to give it a hierarchical structure and precise behavioral criteria. Our taxonomy features categories for both art related and non-art related eye-gaze behaviors. Art Gazes are further categorized as Orientation behaviors, which do not require bodily movement, or Changing Perspective behaviors, which do require bodily movement. This taxonomy, consisting of 32 different behaviors, was developed using mobile eye-tracking data collected with Tobii glasses at the Pieter Vermeersch exhibition at the M Museum in Leuven. The four-room exhibition featured contemporary artworks primarily consisting of marble slabs painted with color gradients, as well as large, architectural installation features. Three raters coded the mobile eye-tracking recordings according to the taxonomical criteria. Four participants' gaze data were used to assess interrater reliability, using the correlation between the durations of taxonomical behaviors coded for each participant by each rater (r = .98) and Cohen's kappa for the agreed number of instances of taxonomical behaviors (k = .67). The taxonomy is both comprehensive and exhaustive in capturing the array of behaviors displayed by participants in the exposition. The use of this taxonomy, or increasingly refined versions of it, will enable us to assess specific behavioral processes which occur in naturalistic museum settings and which may influence aesthetic appreciation.

We present a new framework for the discussion of perspective taking, particularly with reference to the processing of literary narrative. In this framework, adopting a perspective entails matching evaluations with those of the narrative character. This approach predicts that perspectives should be piecemeal rather than holistic, dynamic rather than consistent, effortful rather than automatic, and reactive, in the sense that they are a function of the reader's online processing as it interacts with narrative technique. We describe evidence from an interpolated evaluation method in which readers are periodically interrupted and asked to rate evaluations from a character's perspective. The results indicate that interpolated evaluations interact with narratorial stance to determine a character's transparency—that is, the extent to which she is rational and understandable. In particular, interpolated questions increase transparency of the focal character when there is minimal narratorial guidance, but decrease transparency when the narrator adopts a relatively distanced stance towards that character. These results demonstrate that perspective taking depends on the details of a reader's processing over the course of the story.

Summary Colour and space are pervasive topics in both perception and art. This article investigates the role of colour and pattern in relation to space and time in the art works by two artists: Frank Stella, a well-known Post-War American abstract painter, and Pieter Vermeersch, an emerging Belgian abstract painter, representing a contemporary trend to break the barriers between artistic disciplines. While Stella adheres to the Modernist logic of non-illusionistic, non-spatial, non-referential art as object, perceived instantaneously, Vermeersch explores ways to enhance the viewers’ spatial and temporal experiences through complex art installations with multiple objects and architectural elements interacting with each other and with the spaces in which they are embedded. We discuss these major themes in some representative art works, and in the way they are perceived and appreciated by contemporary viewers, investigated in four empirical studies: two laboratory experiments using well-controlled stimuli derived from at works, and two museum studies employing a variety of methods, including mobile eye-tracking and questionnaires.

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