Abstract
Op Art generates illusory visual motion. It has been proposed that eye movements participate in such illusion. This study examined the effect of eye movement instructions (fixation vs. free exploration) on the sensation of motion as well as the body sway of subjects viewing Op Art paintings. Twenty-eight healthy adults in orthostatic stance were successively exposed to three visual stimuli consisting of one figure representing a cross (baseline condition) and two Op Art paintings providing sense of motion in depth—Bridget Riley’s Movements in Squares and Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s Rollers. Before their exposure to the Op Art images, participants were instructed either to fixate at the center of the image (fixation condition) or to explore the artwork (free viewing condition). Posture was measured for 30 s per condition using a body fixed sensor (accelerometer). The major finding of this study is that the two Op Art paintings induced a larger antero-posterior body sway both in terms of speed and displacement and an increased motion illusion in the free viewing condition as compared to the fixation condition. For body sway, this effect was significant for the Riley painting, while for motion illusion this effect was significant for Kitaoka’s image. These results are attributed to macro-saccades presumably occurring under free viewing instructions, and most likely to the small vergence drifts during fixations following the saccades; such movements in interaction with visual properties of each image would increase either the illusory motion sensation or the antero-posterior body sway.
Highlights
It has been shown that the study of postural adjustments of the body to pictorial elements and the overall compositional organization of artworks can provide a physiological measure of a viewer’s reaction to these stimulus properties
Subjective Evaluation Motion Illusion The results for the subjective evaluation of the sensation are presented in Figure 2 as a function of the stimulus (Riley’s and Kitaoka’s paintings) and viewing instructions
Eye Movement Instructions Enhance Motion Sensation for Kitaoka’s Artwork This study examined the subjective sense of motion and body sway in relation to eye movement instructions to two Op Art stimuli previously shown to generate strong motion perception in a pilot study
Summary
It has been shown that the study of postural adjustments of the body (posturography) to pictorial elements and the overall compositional organization of artworks can provide a physiological measure of a viewer’s reaction to these stimulus properties. Kapoula et al (2011) investigated the effects of pictorial depth on body sway. They found a significantly greater increase in sway when observers untrained in the visual arts fixated the principal background area vs the foreground of the Renaissance painting The Annunciation by Piero della Francesca. Op Art induces body sway participants viewed experimentally generated cubist transformations of the same paintings in which pictorial depth cues were neutralized. Simpler mechanism, privileged by the authors, was the direct influence of pre-attentive visual analysis of depth cues on body sway rather than the conscious perception processes mentioned above
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