' Perception of Visual Art'

In modernity, art experts are considered as a separate group of art viewers that experience art in a distinctive manner (Savazzi et al., 2014). It is assumed that one must learn how to interpret a work of art. In art schools and art history classes , future artists and experts on art are trained to pay attention, beyond the figurative elements of a painting, to other aspects of the paintings (e.g. the historical context, different painting styles and the composition of objects, forms and colour; Pihko et al., 2011, p. 1). Consequently, it is a common belief that art experts can perceive more in paintings than non-experts. They are thought to guide their gaze through their internal cognitive schemes or strategies which enable them to look beyond such figurative elements. However, this belief lacks experimental evidence. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating, by means of an eye-tracking device, the visual explorative behaviour of people with differing level of expertise of art, in “bottom-up saliency regions” and “top-down saliency regions”, while looking at paintings. I have created and conducted, an experiment to measure to what extent someone’s familiarity with art influences his or her eye fixations during the perception of paintings. The experiment consisted of gathering physical data (recoding participants’ eye-movements) and survey data (e.g., registration of background variables and cultural capital of the participants) regarding the observation of paintings. Because I particularly focused on the difference in top-down and bottom-up perception during art-viewing instead of natural scene-viewing, the use of actual original paintings was required. Therefore, the experiment took place in an exhibition context (i.e. Museum Boijmans van Beuning) which meant that the data-collection tools (SMI-ETG device) had to be flexible and work in an indoor environment. It also meant that I had to reconverted the raw data in many different ways in order to make the data usable for interpretation. Results revealed that there was no strong evidence of differences between the eye-movements of people with differing level of expertise in art, viewing works of art. Hence, results did show there was a difference in appreciation of art among people with differing level of expertise in art, however this also didn’t correlate with differences in eye-movements.