Task-dependent eye-movement patterns in viewing art

Abstract

In art schools and classes for art history students are trained to pay attention to different aspects of an artwork, such as art movement characteristics and painting techniques. Experts are better at processing style and visual features of an artwork than nonprofessionals. Here we tested the hypothesis that experts in art use different, task-dependent viewing strategies than nonprofessionals when analyzing a piece of art. We compared a group of art history students with a group of students with no art education background, while viewing 36 paintings under three discrimination tasks. Participants were asked to determine the art movement, the date and the medium of the paintings. We analyzed behavioral and eye-movement data of 27 participants. Our observers adjusted their viewing strategies according to the task, resulting in longer fixation durations and shorter saccade amplitudes for the medium detection task. We found higher task accuracy and subjective confidence, less congruence and higher dispersion in fixation locations in experts. Expertise also influenced saccade metrics, biasing it towards larger saccade amplitudes, advocating a more holistic scanning strategy of experts in all three tasks.

Titles and Semantic Violations Affect Eye Movements When Viewing Contemporary Paintings

“…Also, successfully completed difficult task is associated with long fixations, but high workload and high stress is associated with shorter fixations (Holmqvist and Andersson, 2017). Longer fixations are also associated with pictorial medium identification which is a task requiring careful scanning (Sharvashidze and Schütz, 2020).…”

“…Decreased amplitudes are related to more difficult tasks and effortful processing (May et al, 1990) as when viewers are asked to identify a particular artistic medium used in a painting (Sharvashidze and Schütz, 2020). However, larger saccade amplitudes can be related to presence of multiple meaningful visual cues (Goldberg et al, 2002).…”

Psychophysiological and behavioral responses to descriptive labels in modern art museums

“…In the future, it would be interesting to test art-expert participants; the knowledge they already possess should be enough to understand the meaning of the artwork and have a satisfying experience without the need for informative materials. Expertise is known to lead to higher aesthetic appreciation of artworks and differences in viewing strategies, gaze patterns, fixation distributions, and even in electrophysiological correlates [ 44 , 59 – 62 ]. Fixations should be more focused on salient parts of artworks because the meaning could be grasped even without a descriptive label.…”

Eye tracking and visual arts. Introduction to the special thematic issue

“…On the other hand, it is related to cognitive processes: longer fixations indicate a higher cognitive load (Galley, Betz, & Biniossek, 2015). Therefore, the duration of fixations can depend on the task and the expertise (Sharvashidze & Schütz, 2020;Stein, Jossberger & Gruber, 2022) as well as vary in different parts of an artwork (Miscena, Arato, & Rosenberg, 2020); 4). It is also revealing to measure changes of the duration of fixations over the entire beholding time.…”

“…(Buswell, 1935) already noted that there are two successive phases in the viewing of images: First, for a few seconds, global viewing with large saccades and short fixations, followed by local viewing with small saccades and long fixations. The ratio of global versus local gazes thus depends on the course of beholding, but also on the stimulus and its parts, on the expertise of the viewer and any tasks they were asked to perform (Sharvashidze & Schütz, 2020).…”