Abstract
While aesthetic experiences are not limited to any particular context, their sensorial, cognitive and behavioral properties can be profoundly affected by the circumstances in which they occur. Given the ubiquitous nature of contextual effects in nearly all aspects of behavior, investigations aimed at delineating the context-dependent and context-independent aspects of aesthetic experience and engagement with aesthetic objects in a diverse range of settings are important in empirical aesthetics. Here, we analyze the viewing behavior of visitors (N = 19) freely viewing 15 paintings in the 20th-century Australian collection room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In particular, we focus on how aspects of viewing behavior including viewing distance in the gallery condition and eye gaze measures such as fixation count, total fixation duration and average fixation duration are affected by the artworks’ physical characteristics including size and image statistics properties such as Fourier amplitude spectrum, fractal dimension and entropy. In addition, the same artworks were viewed in the laboratory, either scaled to fit most of the screen (N = 22) or to preserve their relative size as in the museum condition (N = 17) to assess the robustness of these relationships across different presentation contexts. We find that the effects of presentation context are modulated by the artworks’ physical characteristics.
Highlights
It is well-established that context affects aesthetic experience and that investigations in authentic and ecologically-valid settings such as art museums are important in empirical aesthetics
Participants in our sample spent, on average, 4.8 % of their total visit time looking at their mobile phones and 2% of the total visit time looking at other people
The results show that none of the image statistics measures were significant predictors of the average number of fixations [F(4, 10) = 1.212, p = 0.365) and the same was observed for the total fixation duration [F(4, 10) = 3.309, p = 0.057]
Summary
It is well-established that context affects aesthetic experience and that investigations in authentic and ecologically-valid settings such as art museums are important in empirical aesthetics (for a review see Pelowski et al, 2017). In recent times the way we engage with art has changed dramatically, owing to the proliferation and accessibility of digital information sources and online art repositories. Museums have created repositories of their collections visitors can scroll through when looking at works of art in the traditional way, but virtual exhibitions, where avatars mimic navigation in real museums, have become popular in recent years. Museums such as the Louvre, the Guggenheim (NYC), and the British
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