What we look at in Paintings : A Comparison Between Experienced and Inexperienced Art Viewers

摘要

How do people look at art? Are there any differences between how experiencedand inexperienced art viewers look at a painting? We approach thesequestions by analyzing and modeling eye movement data from a cognitiveart research experiment, where the eye movements of twenty test subjects,ten experienced and ten inexperienced art viewers, were recorded while theywere looking at paintings.Eye movements consist of stops of the gaze as well as jumps between thestops. Hence, the observed gaze stop locations can be thought of as a spatialpoint pattern, which can be modeled by a spatio-temporal point process. Weintroduce some statistical tools to analyze the spatio-temporal eye movementdata, and compare the eye movements of experienced and inexperienced artviewers. In addition, we develop a stochastic model, which is rather simplebut fits quite well to the eye movement data, to further investigate the differencesbetween the two groups through functional summary statistics.