A Review of Eye Tracking Studies Related to Visual Aesthetic Experience: A Bottom-Up Approach

Abstract

In the context of visual aesthetics, a bottom-up approach deals with the features of the visual stimuli such as form, texture, color, novelty, complexity, composition, contrast, and order. These features influence subject’s perception during an aesthetic experience. As per philosophy, both subject and object should be present to have an aesthetic experience. Though there are several attempts reported by the researchers to evaluate visual aesthetics using biometric technologies, eye tracking has been found to be an efficient technique to investigate bottom-up aesthetic processes that operate with both object and subject. As reported by earlier researchers, the eye tracking-based studies convey meaningful visual aesthetic properties from visual exploration patterns of the subjects and have been reviewed thoroughly in the present paper. Different types of human visual behavior during aesthetic visual exploration (specific and diversive) have also been mentioned with citation of earlier works. Most of the reported eye tracking-based researches are limited to saliency study and have used unstructured variables to evaluate visual aesthetics. It has been observed from the available literature that the level of complexity and quality of composition of the visuals may be considered as the well-accepted measures to judge the aesthetic experience. Association of various sub-variables of composition (symmetry, balance, and proportion) and complexity (number of elements, variety of elements, and order of elements) with different eye tracking variables (fixation frequency, fixation duration, and first fixation) has already been reported by the researchers in a discrete manner. Hence, there is a need for the future research to establish correlations between various eye tracking variables and the measures of aesthetics with the ultimate aim of objective-measurement of visual aesthetics.