Expertise influences meaning-making with Renaissance portraits: Evidence from gaze and thinking-aloud.

Abstract

This article is concerned with the ways in which expertise in art history is reflected in meaning-making. We compared a group of students of art history with students with no particular background in art, capturing their eye-movements while viewing Renaissance portraits. To balance central bias, 5 single and 5 double portraits were presented in an initial session limited to 10-s viewing time and in a second session with simultaneous thinking-aloud. Eye-tracking results show that in contrast to laypersons, art historians are more effective in searching for content that is promising for successful meaning-making when looking at representational art. Additionally, experts show deeper engagement with higher levels of meaning of this specific content and in general make more attempts at interpretation than laypersons. Considering the form versus content discussion in aesthetic psychology, this study provides first evidence that the predominate rationale that experts focus on style and laypersons on content is a rather rough perspective and can be refined by having a closer look at the perceptual and cognitive strategies of participants when looking at artworks of a specific style and genre.

Task-dependent eye-movement patterns in viewing art

“…Another controversial issue is whether students of art university departments fulfil the criteria of art expertise, the problem also discussed in Bauer and Schwan ( 48 ). According to Ericsson and Lehmann ( 30 ), experts in most domains attain their highest performance levels after a decade of intensive training.…”

“…For instance, Nodine et al ( 43 ) showed that experts are sensitive to composition and use structure of a painting to allocate their attention to the informative parts of the painting. Bauer and Schwan ( 48 ) showed that experts are more effective in searching for content that is helpful for successful meaning-making in the Renaissance portraits. Accordingly, experts seem to be better at looking for specific aspects of an artwork that are relevant for the task.…”

The closer, the better? Processing relations between picture elements in historical paintings

“…This indicates that when looking at a painting, experts compared to lay viewers visually and cognitively associate spatially distant picture elements in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of the picture. For example, it is important for the understanding of Renaissance portraits to consider the meaning of the symbolic objects usually depicted in the periphery of the paintings (Bauer & Schwan, 2018) and relate them to the centrally depicted person. One reason for this difference in eye movement behaviour may be that laypersons lack the prior knowledge of the meaning of such symbols or other types of relations between picture elements.…”

“People are gazing” — An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Viewing Velázquez

“…Art experts have been characterised as art-historians (e.g. Bauer and Schwan, 2018;Commare, Rosenberg and Leder, 2018) students of art-history or art (Cela-Conde et al, 2002;Bimler, Snellock and Paramei, 2019), museums professionals (Locher, Gray and Nodine, 1996;van Paasschen, Bacci and Melcher, 2015) and artists themselves (Shourie, Firoozabadi and Badie, 2014;Koide et al, 2015). This elicits various questions.…”