“You Can Tell a Man by the Emotion He Feels”: How Emotions Influence Visual Inspection of Abstract Art in Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract

AbstractArt is a complex subject of analysis. Nonetheless, Empirical Aesthetics has proved that the interaction between some bottom-up and top-down mechanisms shapes individuals’ perception of a work of art. Recently, the Vienna Integrated Model for Art Perception [1] added that, during the observation of an artwork, the emotional state of the observer, as a top-down component, could influence the visual perception of the artwork, as a bottom-up one. Positive emotions can influence visual exploration, by broadening the attention focus during the observation of a normal stimulus [2]. However, whether this mechanism applies also for peculiar objects, i.e., abstract paintings, is still unexplored. In this study, we investigated how the emotional state of the subject influenced his/her following visual exploration of abstract works of art, featured in an immersive format. Thirty participants (20 males, 10 females) had been emotionally primed by either a positive (condition 1), negative (condition 2) or neutral affect (condition 3), as a control condition, before they observed 11 abstract paintings displayed in an immersive° format. Participants’ eyes gazes were measured during the view of artistic stimuli through an eye-tracking device integrated in a virtual reality viewer (HTC VIVE Pro-eye). Analyses of eye-tracking metrics from participants - fixations and saccades- showed that individuals experiencing an induced positive mood broadened their visual attention, thus exploring more each painting, while participants in a negative mood explore generally less each work of art. This study confirmed that positive emotions pushed subjects to visually explore more the paintings presented in a virtual environment and confirmed the influence of the emotional state of the observer, as a top-down component, also in the visual exploration of an artwork.KeywordsPsychology of aestheticVirtual realityEmotionVisual perception