Abstract
In 1935 Guy Buswell, an educational psychologist at Chicago University, published How People Look at Pictures. In it he recorded photographically the eye movements of 200 observers when looking at a wide variety of pictures. He analysed the overall distribution of fixations on pictures, compared the first few fixations on a picture to the last few, measured the durations of fixations made early in viewing and those made near the end of viewing, examined how fixation duration changed with viewing time, recorded the consistency between different observers when viewing the same picture and he looked at the influence of instructions given to observers upon their eye movements when viewing a picture. He commented on the substantial differences between individuals and noted that instructions had a dramatic effect on the pattern of eye movements. Buswell’s analysis was graphical rather than statistical. In this article Buswell’s figures are recombined and his research is placed in the context of earlier investigations of eye movements with pictures by Stratton and Judd and later ones by Yarbus.
Highlights
“The effect of different types of design in carrying the eye swiftly from one place to another is apparently much less than is assumed in the literature of art.” (Buswell, 1935, p. 115)
Recording eye movements when looking at complex visual stimuli like pictures was a technical tour de force in 1935
The novelty of the investigations was appreciated by Buswell but the reader gets the impression from the text that there were no relevant studies before this
Summary
“The effect of different types of design in carrying the eye swiftly from one place to another is apparently much less than is assumed in the literature of art.” (Buswell, 1935, p. 115). Five major aspects of the eye movement records were considered in sequence by Buswell: centres of interest, fixation durations, picture characteristics, individual differences and the effects of instructions. These will be described and illustrated where possible with respect to the picture illustrated most frequently in Plates by Buswell – Hokusai’s The Wave. Other aspects of Buswell’s data suggest less concordance between eye movements and the characteristics of the picture When he showed participants more basic designs and patterns he found that: “The effect of different types of design in carrying the eye swiftly from one place to another is apparently much less than is assumed in the literature of art. The results for this procedure were inconclusive in terms of the number of fixations, their durations and the centres of interest, the pictures were observed for longer after reading
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