Abstract
Earlier work by one of us examined a historical corpus of portraits and found that artists often paint the subject such that one eye is centred horizontally. If due to psychological mechanisms constraining artistic composition, this eye-centring bias should be detectable also in portraits by non-professionals. However, this finding has been questioned both on theoretical and empirical grounds. Here we tested eye-centring in a larger (N ~ = 4000) and more representative set of selfies spontaneously posted on Instagram from six world cities. In contrast with previous selfie results, the distribution of the most-centred eye position peaked almost exactly at the horizontal centre of the image and was statistically different from predictions based on realistic Monte-Carlo predictions. In addition, we observed a small but statistically reliable pseudoneglect effect as well as a preference for centring the left-eye. An eye-centring tendency appears to exist in self-portraits by non-artists.
Highlights
How do visual artists compose their work? Rudolf Arnheim [1] famously argued that a key mechanism in pictorial composition is the dynamics of centric and eccentric perceptual “forces”
Eye centring in selfies within the picture frame
We used the publicly available selfiecity database, which consists of 3840 images spontaneously posted on the social media platform Instagram from six world cities (Bangkok, Berlin, London, Moscow, New York City, and São Paulo) from September 21 to 27, Eye centring in selfies
Summary
Rudolf Arnheim [1] famously argued that a key mechanism in pictorial composition is the dynamics of centric and eccentric perceptual “forces”. He proposed that artistic composition is shaped by tradeoffs between forces applied in relation to variously defined centres within pictorial structures. Perhaps one of the best candidate examples of compositional dynamics in relation to centres is an observation reported by Tyler [2,3]. Examining a corpus of portraits and self-portraits from various sources, Tyler observed that most had one eye positioned close to the vertical centre line. Tyler [2] suggested that horizontal eye-centering at a location above the vertical center represents a hidden principle of composition which painters have applied either consciously or unconsciously throughout the centuries
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