The effect of painting beauty on eye movements

Abstract

The current study aimed to determine relationships between oculomotor behavior and aesthetical evaluation of paintings. We hypothesized that paintings evaluated as beautiful compared to nonbeautiful would be associated with different oculomotor behavior in terms of fixation duration, viewing time, and temporal and spatial distribution of attention. To verify these hypotheses, we examined forty participants that looked at and evaluated 140 figurative paintings while their eye movements were recorded. To analyze data, we used divergence point analysis (DPA) and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA). The results of the DPA suggested that fixation durations longer than 229 ms are sensitive to the effect of aesthetical evaluation. We also found that the effect of aesthetical evaluation was significant in the time window between 2.3 s and 19.8 s of viewing a painting. The results of the RQA suggested that the participants viewed paintings evaluated as beautiful in a more structured manner compared to those evaluated as non-beautiful, which suggests higher involvement of top-down processes while facing beautiful artwork. We discuss and refer these results to the literature on cognitive processes related to aesthetical evaluation of paintings.