Abstract
How does expertise influence the perception of representational and abstract paintings? We asked 20 experts on art history and 20 laypersons to explore and evaluate a series of paintings ranging in style from representational to abstract in five categories. We compared subjective esthetic judgments and emotional evaluations, gaze patterns, and electrodermal reactivity between the two groups of participants. The level of abstraction affected esthetic judgments and emotional valence ratings of the laypersons but had no effect on the opinions of the experts: the laypersons’ esthetic and emotional ratings were highest for representational paintings and lowest for abstract paintings, whereas the opinions of the experts were independent of the abstraction level. The gaze patterns of both groups changed as the level of abstraction increased: the number of fixations and the length of the scanpaths increased while the duration of the fixations decreased. The viewing strategies – reflected in the target, location, and path of the fixations – however indicated that experts and laypersons paid attention to different aspects of the paintings. The electrodermal reactivity did not vary according to the level of abstraction in either group but expertise was reflected in weaker responses, compared with laypersons, to information received about the paintings.
Highlights
In paintings, the viewer’s eye is caught by human figures, especially faces
How does expertise influence the perception of representational and abstract paintings? We asked 20 experts on art history and 20 laypersons to explore and evaluate a series of paintings ranging in style from representational to abstract in five categories
The level of abstraction affected esthetic judgments and emotional valence ratings of the laypersons but had no effect on the opinions of the experts: the laypersons’ esthetic and emotional ratings were highest for representational paintings and lowest for abstract paintings, whereas the opinions of the experts were independent of the abstraction level
Summary
Gaze behavior during picture viewing is affected by physically salient visual features, cognitive factors, such as the given task, are important (Buswell, 1935; Yarbus, 1967; DeAngelus and Pelz, 2009). The viewer’s internal cognitive plans or strategies may differently guide the gaze. Artists and experts on art are expected to view paintings differently from laypersons. Differences in gaze behavior can be studied by analyzing fixations and saccades. The idea of expert cognitive strategies has prompted several studies on comparison of the eye-movements of experts vs laypersons in different areas of expertise. The particular eye-movement behavior of the chess experts was accompanied by bilateral brain activation, in contrast to only lefthemisphere activation in the novices, and the authors suggested the right hemisphere activation to be linked to holistic processing of the stimuli
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