Experiencing Art: The Influence of Expertise and Painting Abstraction Level

Abstract

How does expertise influence the perception of representational and abstract paintings? We asked 20 experts on art history and 20 laypersons to explore and evaluate a series of paintings ranging in style from representational to abstract in five categories. We compared subjective esthetic judgments and emotional evaluations, gaze patterns, and electrodermal reactivity between the two groups of participants. The level of abstraction affected esthetic judgments and emotional valence ratings of the laypersons but had no effect on the opinions of the experts: the laypersons’ esthetic and emotional ratings were highest for representational paintings and lowest for abstract paintings, whereas the opinions of the experts were independent of the abstraction level. The gaze patterns of both groups changed as the level of abstraction increased: the number of fixations and the length of the scanpaths increased while the duration of the fixations decreased. The viewing strategies – reflected in the target, location, and path of the fixations – however indicated that experts and laypersons paid attention to different aspects of the paintings. The electrodermal reactivity did not vary according to the level of abstraction in either group but expertise was reflected in weaker responses, compared with laypersons, to information received about the paintings.

Dance expertise modulates behavioral and psychophysiological responses to affective body movement.

“…The observation that GSR responses were overall higher in controls rather than dancers. This is congruent with previous reported differences between experts and laypersons in other art domains (painting), where novel stimuli typically elicit greater physiological arousal responses than familiar responses (Pihko et al, 2011). This observation does, however, raise interesting questions for future studies in terms of how the effects of novelty/familiarity of stimuli interact with the sensitivity of the observer to affective dimensions.…”

Dog owners show experience-based viewing behaviour in judging dog face approachability

“…Previous studies have suggested that expertise in a particular area would promote an expert cognitive strategy in sampling and processing visual information, such as modifying gaze distribution in viewing paintings, watching sports videos and interpreting medical images (e.g., Kundel et al, 2008;Pihko et al, 2011;Crespi et al, 2012;Wood et al, 2014). In this study, we extended this expertise-or experiencedmodified viewing behaviour to the processing of non-conspecific faces by systematically comparing dog-owners' and non-dog-owners' behavioral performance and gaze distribution in judging face approachability.…”

“…Such expertise-modulated gaze pattern differences have been observed between expert and novice observers when they look at pictures or art pieces (Zangemeister, Sherman, & Stark, 1995;Vogt & Magnussen, 2007;Humphrey & Underwood, 2009;Pihko et al, 2011), watch sports videos (Crespi, Robino, Silva, & de'Sperati, 2012), read music (Waters, Underwood, & Findlay, 1997), interpret medical images (Nodine, Kundel, Lauver, & Toto, 1996;Donovan & Manning, 2007;Kundel, Nodine, Krupinski, & Mello-Thomas, 2008;Matsumoto et al, 2011;Wood, Batt, Appelboam, Harris, & Wilson, 2014), drive (Underwood, 1998;Nabatilan, Aghazadeh, Nimbarte, Harvey, & Chowdhury, 2012), or play chess (Reingold, Charness, Pomplun, & Stampe, 2001). For instance, in comparison with laypersons, experienced radiologists tend to adopt a more global gaze strategy to 5 examine mammography images in detecting breast cancer (Kundel et al, 2008), arttrained viewers often scan a larger surface of representational paintings and give higher aesthetic rating when evaluating abstract paintings (Pihko et al, 2011), and the experienced drivers fixate more on the front and centre view, and make fewer driving errors when facing visual distraction (Nabatilan et al, 2012). Based on these earlier studies, it is reasonable to assume that for a given task, the pet owners are likely to adopt an experienced-based viewing behaviour to extract informative facial information from familiar non-conspecific faces.…”

Affective Analysis of Abstract Paintings Using Statistical Analysis and Art Theory

“…Several works that deal with emotional analysis of images and artworks reports that using the dimensional approach has as advantages the disambiguation of the emotional states and the consistency with the way the brain processes emotion Hanjalic [2006]; Leder et al [2012Leder et al [ , 2014; Lu et al [2012]; Pihko et al [2011]. Nicolaou et al [2011] points out that the automatic emotion recognition models "are deemed unrealistic as they are unable to capture the non-basic and subtle affective states exhibited by humans in everyday interactions".…”

“…Analysing eye movements and fixations has been used as an important tool to understand the human perception of an artwork and the features that are closely related to a specific emotion Pihko et al [2011]. Moreover, emotional stimuli were shown to attract attention.…”