Observing Individuals Viewing Art

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms underlying the perception of artworks is of significant interest in experimental esthetics. Therefore, in this study, we utilized eye-tracking for investigating how participants familiar and unfamiliar with paintings' titles viewed Kandinsky's abstract and figural artworks. The analysis of behavioral data indicated that knowledge of the title increased participants' liking of the presented paintings and demonstrated a general preference for figural over abstract paintings. Next, we focused the analysis of eye-movement data on areas of the paintings that depict themes associated with their titles. The results demonstrated that participants familiar with the titles viewed these longer and visited them earlier compared with those unfamiliar with paintings' titles. Furthermore, all participants viewed these areas within figural paintings longer and returned to them more often than within abstract paintings. These findings extend previous results by indicating how presenting short titles influences participants' viewing of abstract and figural artworks.

Contextualizing information enhances the experience of environmental art.

“…Also, participants generally liked figurative artworks with title better (Bubić, Sušac, & Palmović, 2017;Lin & Yao, 2018).…”

Aesthetic Experience of Representational Art: Liking Is Affected by Audio-Information Naming and Explaining Inaccuracies of Historical Paintings

“…Empirical evidence of effects of additional information on aesthetic emotions is scarce. The present literature has mostly reported no effects of additional information in the form of titles on the emotional experience (Bubić et al, 2017) and interest (Leder et al, 2006;Gerger and Leder, 2015). One study considered art appreciation as a scale of interest and liking ratings together and reported significant effects of additional information (Swami, 2013).…”

“…Subsequently, we could also not show a compensating effect of explanations for interest and confusion. Research on aesthetics often reported non-significant effects of additional information, such as titles, on emotional outcomes (Bubić et al, 2017) or more specifically interest (Leder et al, 2006;Gerger and Leder, 2015). These results, however, are surprising since a close link between liking and the experience of aesthetic emotions can be assumed to be based on the models (Pelowski et al, 2017).…”

“…They thus differ from other additional information, such as information about the prices of paintings or opinions of other people that could also influence the aesthetic experience, but in a different way, namely via priming the viewers expectations (Lauring et al, 2016). Research corroborates positive effects of titles and short text labels on the viewer's subjective understanding of paintings (Russell, 2003;Leder et al, 2006;Swami, 2013;Bubić et al, 2017) and their aesthetic appreciation (Millis, 2001;Russell, 2003;Belke et al, 2010;Swami, 2013;Gerger and Leder, 2015;Bubić et al, 2017). However, a recent review (Chmiel and Schubert, 2019) points out a substantial number of studies that did not observe effects of additional information on subjective understanding and aesthetic appreciation in the form of liking.…”

Linguistic Analysis of Statements Concerning Paintings Viewed Under Different Instructions by Experts and Novices in the Visual Arts

“…However, it is not the very presence or absence of a title of an artwork that influences its greater or lesser appreciation. This depends on how it is formulated (Bubić, Sušac, & Palmović, 2017;Gerger & Leder, 2015;Leder, Carbon, & Ripsas, 2006;Millis, 2001;Thömmes & Hübner, 2014), to what extent it expresses the author's intentions (Jucker, Barrett, & Wlodarski, 2014), the level of participants' expertise (Mullennix & Robinet, 2018), whether it refers to a work of figurative or abstract art (Belke, Leder, Strobach, & Carbon, 2010;Leder et al, 2006), and even on the experimental design used (within-vs. between-participants) (Russell, 2003).…”