# Apparent duration can be manipulated in a local region of visual field by long-term adaptation to motion or flicker (Johnston, Arnold, & Nishida, 2006). These effects show narrow spatial tuning (Ayhan, Bruno, Nishida, & Johnston, 2009), as well as retinotopic position dependency (Bruno, Ayhan, & Johnston, 2010), supporting early locus in the visual pathway. Here, we introduce a new effect using RDK as a short-term visual adaptor and demonstrate that a brief, subsecond range adaptation induces a significant subjective duration compression (;10%) on a subsequently presented test stimulus (RDK pattern) only for global motion patterns drifting at 50% motion coherence but not for those drifting at 0% coherence, suggesting a higher level area as a source of origin. In another set of experiments using a plaid stimulus as the adaptor and gratings as the tests, we report again a significant duration compression following a brief motion adaptation, although the effect does not seem to be consistently selective for a particular direction of the standard test relative to that of the plaid adaptor (two-dimensional motion) or its components (one-dimensional motion). Finally, we conduct an experiment using shutter glasses and find that the effects of a short-term adaptor presented monocularly to one eye transfer to the nonadapted eye, providing evidence for the interocular transfer. In a series of control experiments, we also show that the duration effects cannot be explained by adaptationinduced changes in perceived speed, perceived onsetand-offset, and attentional resource allocation. Overall, the duration compression effect requiring motion coherence in RDK, persisting in plaid stimulus, and showing interocular transfer imply explicit genuine mechanisms mediating duration effects in the higher level motion areas.

An experiment was conducted to compare museum visitors’ gaze patterns using mobile eye-trackers, whilst they were engaging with a physical and a virtual reality (VR) installation of Piet Mondrian’s Neo-plasticist room design. Visitors’ eye movements produced approximately 25,000 fixations and were analysed using linear mixed-effects models. Absolute and area-normalized dwell time analyses yielded mostly non-significant main effects of the environment, indicating similarity of visual exploration patterns between physical and VR settings. One major difference observed was the decrease of average fixation duration in VR, where visitors tended to more rapidly switch focus in this environment with shorter bursts of attentional focus. The experiment demonstrated the ability to compare gaze data between physical and virtual environments as a proxy to measure the similarity of aesthetic experience. Similarity of viewing patterns along with questionnaire results suggested that virtual galleries can be treated as ecologically valid environments that are parallel to physical art galleries.

Empirical aesthetics is beginning to branch off from conventional laboratory-based studies, leading to in-situ, immersive, often more accessible experiments. Here, we explored different types of aesthetic judgments of three-dimensional artworks in two contexts: virtual reality (VR), aiming for an immersive experience, and online settings aiming for an accessible setup for a remote audience. Following the pilot experiment conducted to select a set of 3D artworks, in the first experiment, participants freely engaged with virtual artworks via an eye-tracking-enabled VR headset and provided evaluations based on subjective measures of aesthetic experience such as ratings on liking, novelty, complexity, perceived viewing duration; and the objective viewing duration was also recorded. Results showed positive, linear, and mostly moderate correlations between liking and the other perceived judgment attributes. Supplementary eye-tracking data showed a range of viewing strategies and variation in viewing durations between participants and artworks. Results of the second experiment, adapted as a short online follow-up, showed converging evidence on correlations between the different aspects contributing to aesthetic judgments and suggested similarity of judgment strategies across contexts. In both settings, participants provided further insights via exit questionnaires. We speculate that both VR and online settings offer ecologically valid experimental contexts, create immersive visual arts experience, and enhance accessibility to cultural heritage.

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