I have seen several studies using eye tracking (you may also want to use gaze tracking and visual perception) in art related scenarios in the International Journal on the Image http://ontheimage.com/ They address a wide variety of images and have proven to be a good resource for me.

Some of the ones I have seen in my searches include:

What stands out in a scene? A study of human explicit saliency judgment (Borji, 2013)

When the screen is not enough: Differences of art exploration in the museum and in the lab (Pedreira, C.,2013)

In the eye of the beholder: Employing statistical analysis and eye tracking for analyzing abstract paintings (Yanulevskaya, V.,2012)

Model for viewing art (Shimotomai, T., 2012)

One of the difficulties in performing literature reviews for eye tracking is the interdisciplinarity of the field. You will find relevant articles in journals and databases for engineering, information sciences, psychology, medicine (ranging from ophthalmology to radiology to diagnosis of childhood disorders), art, plant genetics, geospatial reconnaissance. Just because a study isn't focused on art doesn't mean that it might not be relevant to the way people look at art.

Good luck!

David, this is an interesting question you ask and I rethink that as Carla suggests, there is a lot of research from many disciplines that use this approach. There is also a lot of material that originates from marketing that you may wish to check out. The limitation to eye tracking, as I see this, is that it tells us about where people are looking and the length of their gaze, etc., but it tells us nothing else about why people are looking where they are other than that they look at eye-catching elements.

Carla: Many thanks for the suggestions. I will look into these sources. As for the cross-disciplinary nature of the topic, this is a plus, as I'm a fairly radical transdisciplinary researcher. I like tell my students that academic disciplines, like nationalities, are the result of institutional brainwashing and are largely irrelevant. Of course I am exaggerating, just to challenge their preconceived (or preprogramed) notions!

Paul: The classic Yarbus research and the more recent replication studies I mentioned above give us at least a glimpse of the "why" behind the fixations and saccades, when the researchers manipulate the task variable and observe how eye movement patterns change depending on what the subject is required to report. Of course much more could be learned by, say, looking at fMRI scans in conjunction with ETDs of subjects viewing art of all sorts, or by eliciting verbal response to the art while recording eye movements (or better yet, all three at the same time). I assume someone somewhere is -or soon will- undertake research of this sort, since the tools are increasingly accesible as the years go by. I am not planning to delve deeply in this field, but I think the more an art historian knows about the neuroscientific underpinnings of aesthetic experience, the better he or she will be able to understand the essence of art and how individual objects (or acts) function.

David: It is the "why" that I am interested in as well (although in the medical imaging realm). It is interesting how the study of expertise intersects with the eye tracking literature. In medical imaging, the greater the level of expertise, the shorter the time that is needed to reach a conclusion regarding an image. One interesting study showed that radiologists could diagnose images they viewed for only 500 ms with an 85% accuracy rate. So, this leaves us to wonder how much of "knowing" occurs before the first fixation.

While they have fMRI compatible ETDs, current fMRI images are produced based on increased blood flow resulting from increased energy consumption. So, there is a delay between the brain activity and when the areas of the brain involved with these thought processes actually "light up" on the images. A similar issue occurs with using the think-aloud protocols. The ETDs are currently as close as we can get to real-time activity regarding visual processing. Hopefully, the processing of the aesthetic experience is something that takes place a little more slowly. We are seeing some patterns related to specific tasks related to how radiologists read images. I am trying to translate that into how radiographers view images (which is a totally different knowledge base).

I look forward to hearing more about your exploration.

Thank you for that David. I will look out the source you mention.

Carla, you are doing fascinating work.

Thank you, Paul. You as well. I have been looking for a book like yours because I think the way radiographers look at images is much more similar to the way artists look at images than how radiologists view them. I can't wait for my copy to arrive! What a fun discussion! ResearchGate is the greatest!

Researchgate brings interesting people into my life! I always hoped this would happen at my place of work and of course it does to some extent, but I suppose that it is possible to really target interesting folk on research gate. It's good to know you. Can you tell me a little more about your work?

That's really interesting, Carla. I wonder if the difference in reaction time you mention has something to do with the two sorts of neural processing that go on in the dorsal and ventral streams, both of which are involved in processing visual input coming through the primary visual cortex (or so I gather from indirect accounts of the work of Milner & Goodale, Ungerleiden & Mishkin, and others, primarily from Susan Blackmore's book Consciousness, which I'm using to try to catch up on recent developments in this area).

When I studied neuroscience I seem to recall that what you are saying David is correct about the differential aspects of the dorsal and ventral streams.

Suresh:

Rather than copying and pasting from Wikipedia (this is what my students jokingly call the "control-c control-v" research method), you might as well just say that you found some information there that is relevant to the question and post the link.

I found these phrases on the English Wikipedia "Saccade" page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

"Saccades are a widespread phenomenon across animals with image-forming visual systems. They have been observed in animals"

"Therefore, while saccades serve in humans and other primates to increase the effective visual resolution of a scene, there must be additional reasons for the behavior. The most frequently suggested of these reasons is to avoid blurring of the image"

"These saccades are generated by a neuronal mechanism that bypasses time-consuming circuits and"

"Specific pre-target oscillatory (alpha rhythms) and transient activities occurring in posterior-lateral parietal cortex and occipital cortex also characterise express saccades"

They are identical to the phrases found in your post.

I did another search for your last sentence and found it on the Wikipedia "Posterior parietal cortex" page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterior_parietal_cortex

"The posterior parietal cortex (the portion of parietal neocortex posterior to the primary somatosensory cortex) plays an important role in producing planned movements."

So how much of your post is original? I will put what appear to be your own words in brackets:

"Saccades are a widespread phenomenon across animals with image-forming visual systems. They have been observed in animals .Therefore, while saccades serve in humans and other primates to increase the effective visual resolution of a scene, there must be additional reasons for the behavior. The most frequently suggested of these reasons is to avoid blurring of the image- [needless to say,these are important in artistic expressions..] These saccades are generated by a neuronal mechanism that bypasses time-consuming circuits and [;] Specific pre-target oscillatory (alpha rhythms) and transient activities occurring in posterior-lateral parietal cortex and occipital cortex also characterise express saccades.The posterior parietal cortex (the portion of parietal neocortex posterior to the primary somatosensory cortex) plays an important role in producing planned movements."

Your contribution to this thread, other than providing unattested sentences and phrases copied from two Wikipedia articles, amounts to the words "needless to say,these are important in artistic expressions.." [sic spacing and punctuation] and a semicolon.

I'm sorry if I seem like a detective investigating a case of word theft, but decades of experience as a university professor have trained my mind to automatically evaluate the originality of texts. When I find a jarring change in literary style, my curiosity invariable compels me to seek the origin of the suspicious text. I am fairly certain that most ResearchGate users have also developed these skills, so it is rather futile to attempt to present other people's words as one's own on an academic website like this one.

I'll make a deal with you, Suresh: if you will delete your answer, I will delete this response, and we can forget the whole matter, move on, and learn from this experience.

P. S. I have modified my previous post in an attempt to arrive at a dignified solution to an uncomfortable situation. (The addition is in the last seven paragraphs.)

Dear David,

I used Eye Tracker in Advertising graphs. You can see may home page and you will see the results and decide if it's possible. I believe that the answer is yes, but with some limitations:

http://gent.uab.cat/elenaananos/content/eye-tracking

In this article (sorry is in Spanish language) you can see some results that we have achieved.

http://revistes.uab.cat/grafica/article/view/v1-n2-ananos

Best wishes,

Elena Añaños

Dear Elena:

This is fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing your work. I gave it a few quick fixations (:o ) and I will read the articles with great interest this weekend.

El hecho de que su trabajo esté en castellano es una ventaja, porque lo podrán entender más fácilmente mis estudiantes aquí en Guanajuato, México.

Saludos afectuosos,

David

As you can see, I have an special headland in my home page dedicated to my researches with Eye Tracker. If you need any think else, tell me.

I think that to share our work is very important to the advance of the science.

See you, and happy week end reading the papers!

Elena

Hi check out the work of Angie Brew who has been using drawing / eye tracking for her phd research. Also her old prof John Tchalenko

http://www.factumfoundation.org/pag/212/John-Tchalenko-br-Capturing-Life

Hi everybody!

Sorry, but my name is Elena Añaños. It isn't Elena Carrasco. Why do you think the name witch appears in my answers is Elena Carrasco? Maybe because the letter "ñ". So that is important for me, so I don't Know how to change it.

I see "Elena Ananos"!

Jenny, this is awesome. There are a lot of interesting texts and videos on the Factum Foundation website. This will keep me busy for a while. Many thanks.

Thanks David! That's right, because the "ñ" doesn't exist in English, and this is my name in English, email, etc.

At any rate, I haven't seen "Carrasco", so perhaps there is a software glitch that affects your view without affecting others'.

¡Hola! Elena,

Thanks for those links.

I found this paper very interesting.

http://www.cac.cat/pfw_files/cma/recerca/quaderns_cac/Q37_Ananos_EN.pdf

.

I wonder whether familiarity with/exposure to these techniques over time would change attentional focus with some of the types of NCA you were studying?

When commercial television was in it's infancy, viewers would often sit through advertisement breaks consciously paying attention to the content of every ad, as the advertisement was just as novel an experience as the program it interrupted. Generations who have grown up taking television for granted are adept at screening out traditional TV advertisements and re-engaging their attention when the program resumes (and the "mute" button on remote controls has made this even easier).

.

This makes me wonder whether the generation of children who are growing up now, exposed to techniques like text bars across the bottom of the screen, might by the time they are adults have developed some degree of immunity, having learned to treat these distractors as irrelevant noise and so to ignore them completely, unless the text contains attention grabbing words?

It's also interesting that the heat maps show a great deal of focus directed towards faces. Our visual system has evolved to prioritise identifying anything vaguely resembling a face. An infant is typically capable of identifying and discriminating faces within two weeks of birth, and we are all familiar with the fact that anything vaguely face shaped attracts our attention, even two dots and a line-

:)

This.might imply that techniques like a spilt screen with an actor (even an animated drawing of a person) would be less susceptible to developing an immunity to the distractor.

Product placement is probably the NCA technique that is most difficult to subconsciously screen out or consciously ignore and most likely to influence the viewers subsequent behaviour, (as long as it is done subtly enough to not be obvious-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0 )

Thanks again for sharing your papers. Advertisements are a form of art, (albeit the most commercial form of art) and your research is of direct relevance to David's question.

Regards,

Paul.

Jenny,

Thanks for this;

http://www.factumfoundation.org/pag/212/John-Tchalenko-br-Capturing-Life

.

Fascinating. Cheers,

Paul.

Hi all,

we've dabbled in eye-tracking with art as well. Also compared this to the prediction of some computational methods for measuring saliency and (not surprisingly) discovered that these algorithms are woefully inadequate ;)

http://www.kyb.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/files/publications/CAe2009-Wallraven_5740[0].pdf

Christian Wallraven, Douglas W Cunningham, Jaume Rigau, Miquel Feixas, Mateu Sbert

. Aesthetic Appraisal of Art-from Eye Movements to Computers. Computational aesthetics, 137-144, 2009.

Hello,

It may be rather old but I used to find Velichkovsky's work fascinating- he has explored eye tracking in many different contexts include using ambiguous pictures to see if one interpretation can be communicated to another (seems related to art perception?

http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p250931

There is also some nice new stuff on brain imaging and art perception- see Anjan Chatterjee's book on 'The Aesthetic Brain'

Thanks Christian. Your article is extremely relevant to this question. This sort of research surely can be useful to art students. I'm thinking of putting together a graduate level course on neuroaesthetics, or something like that, for next year. This should give me enough time to learn about the "state of the art."

Thanks for the link, Emma. Maybe I can get it through my university's digital library service. (Here is a good example of how business gets in the way of science; but the open access debate is on another thread: https://www.researchgate.net/topic/open_access_publishing/.) One way or another I'll try to get my hands on the article. I put Chatterjee's book in my Amazon cart a few weeks ago. I guess it's time to go for it.

I'm glad I posted this question!

I'm new to this thread but not to the general conversation. I want to offer a some comments on the entire emerging field of so-called neuroaesthetics. To me the central problem with the agenda is that it reinforces a 'brain-centric' conception of cognition, reinforcing cognitivist/computationalist conceptions and excluding other, ie extended/embedded/embodied conceptions of cognition, rather in the same way that 'consciousness studies' privileges consciousness.

So my question is basic - what do we think will be achieved by eye tracking analysis - and to what fields will the information be useful? Tracking eye movement over a painting may tell us how the eyes move over a painting, but they won't tell us anything about how meaning is gathered. Neuro-physiologically, what do we know about the relation between saccading and foveation and 'vision' - a lot no doubt, but the question of what the brain does with that information remains vague. I we accept the conception of internal representation then - what effect does more attention have on the representation? And if we don't accept internal representation then what is really going on? (Admittedy Gibson had difficulties with related questions regarding perception and painting).

Even if we assume that reasoning on raw perceptions is what people do when they cognise (and I'm dubious), to assume that perception of the meaning (or whatever) in a painting is achieved via the inflow of visual data to a viewer in a static pose in a standard position only speaks about a very conventional modality of art and a very conventional modality of reception.

The first useful use I saw of eye tracking in art was by the German group Art+Com in the mid 90s, and in my opinion they did something much more active and interesting, they altered a digital image based on real time analysis of eye movement.

Simon: You pose some good, thought-provoking questions and observations. I am not by any means an expert in this field, rather someone using ResearchGate to get a closer look, but some of the followers of this question have experience and may provide some interesting answers. I would hesitate, though, to make a general criticism of an entire field, neuroaesthetics or any other, rather than looking at individual studies. My point of view (as a somewhat radical transdisciplinary reearcher) is that neuroaesthetics, used together with other perspectives, can help us attain a deeper understanding of how we as human beings interact with art. Its relative newness is attractive, and I think it may help us to broaden the scope of our studies.

Do you have any more information about the Art+Com project? It sounds quite interesting.

David

(as a somewhat radical transdisciplinary reearcher)

I would put myself in the same category, and one of the aspects of interdisciplinarity which we must be vigilant about is interdisciplinary constellations which nonetheless reinforce - or shrink from interrogating - conventional positions. IMHO there are serious problems with cognitivism/representationalism/internalism and neuroaesthetics worries me form this perspective. gotta go. SP

Just a thought about this, If you consider the Army red and green test, their concept behind this test is to see if their candidates are color blind. Where left eye recognizes green and right eye recognizes red, if the field of vision does not cross or crosses it determines if one can distinguish differences in color verses becoming muddied or grey. This brings me to the question of abilities concerning left and right brain thinking.( lateral verses vertical thinking); concerning communication between the hemispheres of the brain. This is just food for thought.

Kimberly: Careful study of the connections in this diagram

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ERP_-_optic_cabling.jpg

shows how the visual fields are upside-down in the retina; observe how stimuli from the right and left visual fields either stay on the same side or cross over to the other in the optical chiasma. Between the retina and the occipital cortex at the back of the brain, some processing takes part in the various layers of the lateral geniculate nuclei in the thalamus, which have been compared to the switchboards that were used in old telephone networks. The information from the right visual fields of both eyes flows into the primary visual cortex of the left hemisphere, and vice versa. There the information from both eyes merges into a coherent pattern, which has something to do with binocular vision in humans and other primates. This processed neural information flows through two main pathways in both hemispheres to other areas of the cortex for further processing. Eventually we end up with the vivid and magnificent illusion of stereoscopic, colored sight in our consciousness.

I'm not an expert on this, but it's fun to try to understand what's going on with vision.

@David, This is most interesting and I will further study this. Thank You!

Maybe this study is of interest to you: How Do We See Art: An Eye-Tracker Study (Quiroga & Pedreira): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170918/

cheers,

Martin

Yes, Raubal, I have read that study. I recommend it highly to others on this thread. Thank you.

@Raubal, Thank You! The interesting article was very enlightening. And I have always thought the same thing. "Beauty is literally in the eye of the beholder."

Thanks for the inside look at your eye-tracking studies, Efstathios. I will take a look at your publications when I find the time.

Efstathios -

good to hear of your research and your skepticism about eye tracking (and models of neural processing).

"inferring which object(s) a user is actually interested in 3D scenes (e.g. games) in real time using eye tracking data. "

"Consider first that eye tracking is currently inaccurate, "

I think its not just that eye tracking is inaccurate, but that the assumption that foveation straightforwardly indicates 'interest' is dubious.

I always think of Hamlet here - "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than ever dreamed of in your philosophy" Plausible hypotheses are always just that, and are informed from one side by observation an form the other side by theory, and theories are often wrong. (That's why we do science, right?

Although its not directly related, I've just been reading Vittorio Gallese's paper Berfore an Below 'theory of mind' embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition - which demonstrates, in a related field, persuasive new neurally-based theories.

I am taking all this in with great interest.

"I am taking all this in with great interest."

Me too :)

Efstathios, thanks for your reply. The underlying question I suppose, is "what does it mean: cognitively, neurally and occularly, to "look at something" "

"The gaze signal is very noisy-looking, even when using the fastest and most accurate equipment out there. That's because eye gaze itself almost never stays still on primates."

That we have the impression of a coherent visual world 'out there' based in such noisy, spasmodic optical signals (blind spots etc) is a real mystery, isn't it? As a representationalist skeptic, (that is, a skeptic of representationalism), its difficult to comprehend. Do you know the famous McCulloch, Maturana et al paper ' what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain' Of course, that's all reptile brain stuff, and its easy enough to comprehend an enactive, sensorimotor idea of this, but the question of what is really going on in the 'higher visual centers' that results in the sense of a coherent visual world is still unclear (at least to me)

I think students in the visual arts can benefit from a general understanding of the neural underpinnings of visual perception. The first step is to help them see through the powerful illusion that makes most people believe that they perceive reality directly, in a veridical way. Even a superficial introduction to the fundamental principals of visual perception (including the facts that things are upside-down in the retina, that colors are just pigments of the imagination, and that foveal vision is sharper than peripheral vision), followed by an entertaining session exploring optical illusions, can do wonders. Once they comprehend the nature of the illusion, albeit in a rudimentary manner, they can go on to explore ways of moving variables around to see how these affect the perception of their creations, eventually attaining more conscious control over inducing aesthetic experiences in other people's bodies (including, of course, their minds). While new information is emerging faster that we can assimilate it, I think there will always be a sense of mystery about the illusion of sight, just as the expansion of our understanding of the cosmos enhances our feelings of awe when contemplating the vastness and complexity of it all.

Efstathios

-" I didn't even know that frogs had such a perception of this world."

the take-home message in the paper, I think, is that much of 'vision' is not concerned with images. Its dynamical and hooked into sensori-motor circuits. The frog does not 'see' a panoramic, cinematic image of the world, it sees temporal patterns that have meaning, ie 'food'. As Gibson said, 'our eyes have arms and legs'. We, as modern westerners with a culture of pictures, assume that vision, for us and for other species, is a matter of pictures - and motion is a matter of frames. I think this is a false conception, and the longer we remain stuck in it, the longer we will fail to understand vision ad a phenomenon or the way visual neurology works.

The second take-home message in the paper is that it was written over 60 years ago and its implications have been largely ingnored in the cognitivist/representationalist community. You can't understand vision - and you can't simulate it computationally - if you think it is a matter of pictures and sequences of pictures. This has rendered much machine vision/computer vision research just dumb - another example of research being driven by wrong theory and thus only being able to produce results in terms of that theory - getting the right answer to the wrong question. Empirically you can only prove or disprove a theory - you can't come up with alternative explanations.

David - totally agree about the vagaries of vision -foveation, saccading, blind spots, etc. The fact we don't get motion sick as our focus darts about is astonishing. The fact that we think we see a fully resolved panorama of the world is mind-boggling.

And of course the idea that colors are a neural invention an that there are no colors in the world is seriously disturbing.

Excellent comments Simon. Thanks.

You may have a look at the work of Zoi Kapoula :

http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article116

Regards

Guillaume

Merci beaucoup, Guillaume.

Paul

nice quotes form Don Hoffman - a campus colleague, though till now I though we had little in common :)

"I should very much like to join Samuel Johnson in rejecting the claim that perception is not veridical, by kicking a stone and exclaiming "I refute it thus." But even as my foot ached from the ill-advised kick, I would still harbor the skeptical thought, "Yes, you should have taken that rock more seriously, but should you take it literally?" http://edge.org/response-detail/11942

His distinction between 'serious' an literal' brings to mind ideas I've been thinking about re neo-Gibsonian ecological perception. Somebody - I think it was Anthony Chemero - speaks about experiments which show the inaccuracy of human subjects in estimating the weight (mass) of a rock in varying circumstances. He points out that what was being estimated which seems to reflect a fallible sense of the Newtonian, absolute mass value, is in fact an accurate assessment of its 'throwability'. Evolutionarily, the numerical mass value of a rock, in a circumstance where it might or might not be thrown, is irrelevant, a fantastic abstract reverie. What is pragmatically relevant is my estimation of my ability, in my current state of health and fitness, to throw that rock far enough, with enough force, to hit that coconut, sabre tooth tiger or enemy with spear. Hoffman's notion if the 'veridical' is symptomatic of his indoctrination into a scientific world view of absolute, measurable quantities.

Efstathios

"Are you finding images as a metaphor to deal with this side of our perception as flawed?"

I am saying first that vision is not primarily, or not always a mater of images, and to understand it that way is a product of our image-based culture. To go back to the frog - the frog does not see the world, as a picture or a panorama, with objects in in, like we have learned to do. For the frog, the world is hardly there. the non moving world ceases to exist (as in some computer vision algorithms) all that exists are spatio temporal traces of the flight of a fly. And these elicit the tongue-shot in the right direction, like a cybernetically controlled anti-aircraft gun. Likewise von Uexkull tells us the grasshopper is invisible to the jackdaw unless it is moving.

This is why I say a lot of computer vision research has been dumb - because it assumes that vision is pictures and temporal sequences of pictures which then have to be decoded as spaces, objects and gestures. But a lot of vision has nothing to do with images. Gibson knew this, and some of his thinking on the subject has been implemented as Optical Flow - a computer vision technique which has no use for images.

Hi Simon-

This is very interesting.

I spent some of my childhood and teens hunting small game, usually employing a thrown stick or rock.

However I found that with patience I could sometimes even get close enough to rabbits to catch them with my hands. The trick is firstly to approach from down-wind and to move very quietly, and secondly to stay close to the ground and to only move when the animal is focused on cropping grass.

Although rabbits have a very wide visual field (because their eyes are placed so widely on the sides of their head), they are most sensitive to movement, and have poor resolution of detail (because very little of their visual field overlaps). If you freeze low to the ground (so you are not silhouetted) whenever their attention is not directed at the ground in front of their nose, they don't appear to be able to visually distinguish you from the background. If they are not smelling or hearing you, they don't know you are there.

P.S. Rabbits are introduced to Australia, and cause a lot of environmental damage. They also taste great!

Paul.

I imagine that followers of this question (being a group that has won my deepest respect) may have something to say on this other thread:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_distinction_between_figure_and_ground_in_art

Warm regards,

David

Paul

"Rabbits are introduced to Australia" I know all about that - and the cane toads and the camels and , and, and... (I'm an expat).

"I found that with patience I could sometimes even get close enough to rabbits to catch them with my hands."

you should put that in the skills section of your profile. :)

"have poor resolution of detail (because very little of their visual field overlaps)"

the lack of overlap only minimises stereoscopy. They only have it right in front of their noses - which is where they need it, I guess.

"they are most sensitive to movement,"

this, it turns out, is not unusual. I saw a study of cat vision that showed cats vision is surprisingly blurry. Mind you, the study seemed poorly considered, as 1. it showed a wide angle, out of focus photo as if it represented the cats vision. But this representation obviously could not represent sacading or time based vision (ie movement) which we know cats are very sensitive to.

This quote seems to be relevant to the discussion:

"In contrast to foveate species, such as primates (including humans) and cats (which have an area centralis, if not a proper fovea), the rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) displays few spontaneous eye movements, especially in the absence of head motion (Collewijn, 1977; Collewijn & van der Mark, 1972; Fuller, 1980, 1981; Van der Steen & Collewijn, 1984). In normal visual conditions, the rabbit's eyes are very stable but not perfectly immobile. Small amplitude tremor can be observed, as well as very slow drift. Microsaccades have not been observed. However, drift is occasionally corrected by fast saccadic movements (Collewijn, 1977; Collewijn & van der Mark, 1972; Van der Steen & Collewijn, 1984). These differences may be related to the fact that the rabbit does not have a fovea but an elongated horizontal streak with elevated ganglion cell counts. Olveczky, Baccus, and Meister (2003) recorded from ganglion cells in the rabbit and salamander retinas while presenting visual stimuli that were jittered to simulate fixational eye movements (based on parameters from previously published studies by Manteuffel, Plasa, Sommer, & Wess, 1977 and Van der Steen & Collewijn, 1984). In both species, fixational eye movements helped segregate a moving foreground from a complex background in a population of ganglion cells."

Susana Martinez-Conde & Stephen L. Macknik, "Fixational eye movements across vertebrates: Comparative dynamics, physiology, and perception," Journal of Vision, vol. 8, no. 14, article 28 (http://www.journalofvision.org/content/8/14/28.full, access: 20 February 2014).

There is more here on primates, cats, pigeons, owls, turtles, chameleons, amphibians, salamanders, and three species of fish.

A month has gone by, and I finally had a few hours to follow up on the links provided by question followers. All of this material is fascinating and I am very grateful for your input. I put together the following reading list, with links (in the case of articles in Journal of Vision the links take you to abstracts; the rest lead to full texts).

Añaños Carrasco, Elena, “Visual impact and eye fixation of non conventional advertising (NCA) on television among young people and the elderly,” in Quaderns del CAC (Consejo del Audiovisual de Cataluña), vol. 14, no. 2, December 2011, pp. 77-78 (http://www.cac.cat/pfw_files/cma/recerca/quaderns_cac/Q37_Ananos_EN.pdf, access: March 23, 2014).

Añaños Carrasco, Elena; Astals Serés, Anna, “¿Imagen o texto? El poder de captar la atención visual de los elementos gráficos analizado con el eye tracker,” in Gráfica (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), vol. 1, no. 2, 2013, pp. 87-98 (http://revistes.uab.cat/grafica/article/view/v1-n2-ananos, access: March 23, 2014).

Lipps, Marianne; Pelz, Jeff B., “Yarbus revisited: task-dependent oculomotor behavior,” in Journal of Vision (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthamology), vol. 4, no. 8, August 13, 2004, article 15 (http://www.journalofvision.org/content/4/8/115, access: March 23, 2014).

Martínez-Conde, Susana; Macknik, Stephen L., “Fixational eye movements across vertebrates: comparative dynamics, physiology, and perception,” in Journal of Vision (U. S. National Library of Medicine), vol. 8, no. 14, 2008 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19146329, access: March 23, 2014).

Nelson, Jonathan D.; Cottrell, Garrison W.; Mocellan, Javier R.; Sereno, Martin I., “Yarbus lives: a foveated exploration of how task influences saccadic eye movement,” in Journal of Vision (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthamology), vol. 4, no. 8, August 13, 2004, article 741 (http://www.journalofvision.org/content/4/8/741, access: March 23, 2014).

Quian Quiroga, Rodrigo; Pedreira, Carlos, “How do we see art: an eye-tracker study,” in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Frontiers Media), vol. 5, article 98, September 12, 2011 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170918/pdf/fnhum-05-00098.pdf, access: March 23, 2014).

Wallraven, Christian; Cunningham, Douglas W.; Rigau, Jaume; Feixas, Miquel; Sbert, Mateu, “Aesthetic appraisal of art - from eye movements to computers,” in Computational Aesthetics 2009, Eurographics Workshop on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging, Dieter W. Fellner, Werner Hansmann, Werner Purgathofer & François Sillion, editors, Geneva, Eurographics Association, 2009, pp. 137-144 (http://www.kyb.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/files/publications/CAe2009-Wallraven_5740[0].pdf; access: March 23, 2014).

[ResearchGate's software cuts of the end of the hyperlink in the last entry, so it should be copied and pasted manually into your web browser.]

I have been looking at Guillaume's link, and I can add these souces to work by Zoï Kapoula to the list I posted 20 days ago. I selected the studies most related to the perception of works of art. Thanks again, Guillaume.

KAPOULA, Zoï; ADENIS, Marie-Sarah; LÊ, Thanh-Thuan; YANG, Qing; LIPEDE, Gabi

2011 “Pictorial depth increases body sway” (editorial proof), in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (American Psychological Association), vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 186.-193 [1-8 in proof] (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf_art_posture.pdf, access: April 13, 2014).

KAPOULA, Zoï; BUCCI, Maria Pia; YANG, Qing; BACCI, Francesca

2010 “Perception of space in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation: an eye-movement and art-historical study,” in Leonardo (The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology), vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153-158 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/ZK_LEON4302_pp153-158_2010.pdf, access: April 13, 2014).

KAPOULA, Zoï; GANEM, Rebecca; PONCET, Sarah; GINTAUTAS, Daunys; EGGERT, Thomas; BRÉMOND-GIGNAC, Dominique; BUCCI, Maria Pia

2009 “Free exploration of painting uncovers particularly loose yoking of saccades in dyslexics,” in Dyslexia, An International Journal of Research and Practice (John Wiley & Sons), vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 243-259 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/Zk_dyslexia_2009.pdf, access: April 13, 2014).

KAPOULA, Zoï; GINTAUTAS, Daunys; HERBEZ, Olivier; YANG, Qing

2009 “Effects of title on eye-movement exploration of cubist paintings by Fernand Léger,” in Perception (Pion), vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 479-491 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/zk_perception_2009.pdf, access: April 13, 2014).

KAPOULA, Zoï; YANG, Qing; VERNET, Marine; BUCCI, Maria Pia

2009 “Eye movements and pictorial space perception: studies of paintings from Francis Bacon and Piero della Francesca,” in Cognitive Semiotics (De Gruyter Mouton), vol. 5, pp. 103-121 (http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cogsem.2009.5.issue-fall2009/cogsem.2009.5.fall2009.103/cogsem.2009.5.fall2009.103.xml, access: April 13, 2014).

I attended an eye tracking webinar yesterday and "discovered" a great resource:

Eye Tracking: A comprehensive guide to methods and measures. Holmqvist, Kenneth; Nyström, Marcus; Andersson, Richard; Dewhurst, Richard; Jarodzka, Halszka; Weijer, Joost van de (2011-09-22). Oxford University Press.

It approaches the design of eye tracking experiments from a wide variety of disciplines.

Thank you, Karla.

Thanks for your thoughts on this, Efstathios, and for the link. At first glance this looks like an extraordinary source. For now I am just approaching this field, together with cognitive sciences, neurosciences and neuroaesthetics, as sources of information for building a stronger theoretical base for understanding art history and contemporary art, with an eye on its possible applications in the creation and production of art (objects and acts). When I look around, I see a lot of people using theory from two generations ago, so I feel the time has come to make an effort to incorporate the recent explosion of knowledge in these relatively new fields into my academic work and to help my students to understand and to use them in theirs.

For now I have a pilot program, with two brave undergraduate students, in summer research programs sponsored by the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the University of Guanajuato. Next year I hope to expand this into a course for master's and doctoral students in arts, including the preparation of a text in Spanish. Hopefully down the road I can form an interdisciplinary team and do some serious research, perhaps involving eye-tracking. Meanwhile there is much to be read and processed.

I think the questions you ask in your third paragraph would be an excellent starting point for an eye-tracking study. There are a lot of other variables that could be explored, for example the possibilities of chromatic contrasts in attracting fixations to specific locations in the visual field.

I send my best wishes for a happy and fruitful new year to all who have contributed to this thread.

David

Hi David,

two things bother me about this proposal are eyetracking and art :)

First, I would want to be very clear about what kind of data the eyetracking software is collecting, and what kind of theory of vision they propose to support. After all, any software is the instrumentalisation of a theory.

Second, there is much about 'vision' which is not conscious, ie blindsight. We do not know so much about that aspect of vision, and for instance, its relation to the limbic system. We are so fixated of the conscious identifying/naming/categorising aspects of vision. But it is entirely possible - until disproven - that the affective meaning of artworks has much to do with nonconscious vision. 

Thirdly, I think we need to be very careful about what we think is special about art and how we group this artifact as art and that artifact as not-art. A photograph of a landscape is not art unless it was taken by an artist-photographer ? A photo-realist painting of a landscape derived from a photograph is art, but the photograph is not? The art/not art distinction is pretty slippery, and one would want to have some principled reason for making the distinction. You work with early colonial mexican work which we now categorise as art 'art' but was the category even meaningful to those 'artists'?

Note also, J J Gibson admitted his ecological psychology could not deal with art.

best,

Simon

Thanks for your critical observations, Simon. These questions are all important, even necessary, when looking and thinking hard about art.

My self-assigned task, at the moment, is to try to think beyond the theories that have been fashionable in the academic realm, taking into account information that has been emerging from other disciplines. For the last few decades I've been working mostly on the blurry borders between anthropology and art; anthropology is one of the most transdisciplinary fields that exists, covering bioanthropology, ethnography, archaeology, ethnohistory, and lingüistics, not to mention relatively new branches like cognitive anthropology. My move, two and a half years ago, from a History departament to an Art department, has lead me to ask questions that require new information from the cognitive and biological sciences.

Working out a basic definition of what we mean by art, across the temporal, geographic, cultural, and social ranges of our species, is part of this problem. The least fruitful avenue here, at least for this observer, is an elitist view based on an assumed superior aesthetic sensitivity. I have a tentative working definition, for now in Castilian (unfairly called Spanish among most Anglophones); perhaps I'll translate it and post it here on ResearchGate to begin another discussion. The key part or this definition is the concept of the aesthetic experience, which requires its own definition.

Advances over the last quarter of a century in consciousness theory, neuroscience, the study of perception, and neuroaesthetics provide us with an emerging body of evidence that can be used to take our understanding of art and aesthetic experiences to a deeper level. This work is breathing new life into the ideas of pioneers like Leonardo, Merleau-Ponty, Metzger, Arnheim, Gibson, and Gombrich, to name just a few people who have thought along these lines.

Our ocular saccades and fixations are but one aspect of the process of visual perception, but if we don't understand them, our comprehension of the experience of seeing -art objects or acts, or anything else- will be incomplete.

I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to this fascinating topic. Thanks largely to the contributions of the followers of this question, I have put together an incipient and incomplete reading list for myself and my students. If anyone thinks there are important omissions here, further suggestions would be very welcome.

Añaños Carrasco, Elena

2011 “Visual impact and eye fixation of non conventional advertising (NCA) on television among young people and the elderly,” Quaderns del CAC (Consejo del Audiovisual de Cataluña), vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 77-78 (http://www.cac.cat/pfw_files/cma/recerca/quaderns_cac/Q37_Ananos_EN.pdf, access: 23 March 2014).

Añaños Carrasco, Elena; Astals Serés, Anna

2013 “¿Imagen o texto? El poder de captar la atención visual de los elementos gráficos analizado con el eye tracker,” Gráfica (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 87-98 (http://revistes.uab.cat/grafica/article/view/v1-n2-ananos, access: 23 March 2014).

Brieber, David; Nadal, Marcos; Leder, Helmut; Rosenberg, Raphael

2014 “Art in time and space: context modulates the relation between art experience and viewing time,” PLoS One (Public Library of Science), vol. 9, no. 6 (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0099019, access: 20 September 2014).

Brinkmann, Hanna; Commare, Laura; Leder, Helmut; Rosenberg, Raphael

2014 “Abstract art as a universal language?,” Leonardo (MIT Press Journals), vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 256, 257 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265830368_Abstract_Art_as_a_Universal_Language, access: 28 September 2014).

Kapoula, Zoï; Adenis, Marie-Sarah; Lê, Thanh-Thuan; Yang, Qing; Lipede, Gabi

2011 “Pictorial depth increases body sway” (editorial proof), Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (American Psychological Association), vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 186-193 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf_art_posture.pdf, access: 13 April 2014).

Kapoula, Zoï; Bucci, Maria Pia; Yang, Qing; Bacci, Francesca

2010 “Perception of space in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation: an eye-movement and art-historical study,”, en Leonardo (The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology), vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153-158 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/ZK_LEON4302_pp153-158_2010.pdf, access: 13 April 2014).

Kapoula, Zoï; Ganem, Rebecca; Poncet, Sarah; Gintautas, Daunys; Eggert, Thomas; Brémond-Gignac, Dominique; Bucci, Maria Pia

2009 “Free exploration of painting uncovers particularly loose yoking of saccades in dyslexics,” Dyslexia, An International Journal of Research and Practice (John Wiley & Sons), vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 243-259 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/Zk_dyslexia_2009.pdf, access: 13 April 2014).

Kapoula, Zoï; Gintautas, Daunys; Herbez, Olivier; Yang, Qing

2009  “Effects of title on eye-movement exploration of cubist paintings by Fernand Léger,” Perception (Pion), vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 479-491 (http://iris.dr2.cnrs.fr/IMG/pdf/zk_perception_2009.pdf, access: 13 April 2014).

Kapoula, Zoï; Yang, Qing; Vernet, Marine; Bucci, Maria Pia

2009 “Eye movements and pictorial space perception: studies of paintings from Francis Bacon and Piero della Francesca,” en Cognitive Semiotics (De Gruyter Mouton), vol. 5, pp. 103-121 (http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cogsem.2009.5.issue-fall2009/cogsem.2009.5.fall2009.103/cogsem.2009.5.fall2009.103.xml, access: 13 April 2014).

Lipps, Marianne; Pelz, Jeff B.

2004 “Yarbus revisited: task-dependent oculomotor behavior” (abstract), Journal of Vision (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthamology), vol. 4, no. 8, artículo 15 (http://www.journalofvision.org/content/4/8/115, access: 13 April 2014).

Martínez-Conde, Susana; Macknik, Stephen L.

2008 “Fixational eye movements across vertebrates: comparative dynamics, physiology, and perception,” Journal of Vision (U. S. National Library of Medicine), vol. 8, no. 14 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19146329, access: 23 March 2014).

Melcher, David; Colby, Carol L.

2008  “Trans-saccadic perception, Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Elsevier), vol. 12, no. 12, pp. 466-473 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661308002325, access 18 December 2014).

Nelson, Jonathan D.; Cottrell, Garrison W.; Mocellan, Javier R.; Sereno, Martin I.

2004 “Yarbus lives: a foveated exploration of how task influences saccadic eye movement” (abstract), Journal of Vision (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthamology), vol. 4, no. 8, article 741 (http://www.journalofvision.org/content/4/8/741, access: 13 April 2014).

Pomplun, Marc; Ritter, Helga; Velichkovsky, Boris

1996 “Disambiguating complex visual information: towards communication of personal views of a scene,” Perception (Pion), vol. 25, no. 8, pp. 931-948 (preliminary version: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14269194_Disambiguating_complex_visual_information_towards_communication_of_personal_views_of_a_scene, access: 13 December 2014).

Quian Quiroga, Rodrigo; Pedreira, Carlos

2011 “How do we see art: an eye-tracker study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Frontiers Media), vol. 5, artículo 98 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170918/pdf/fnhum-05-00098.pdf, updated: 12 September 2011, access: 30 July 2014).

Syaiou, Stella; Patias, Petros; Gelos, Leonidas; Ziogas, Yiannis

2013 “Exploring roads less traveled: eye-tracking studies in art,” Re-New Digital Arts Festival, The Big Picture, The Confluence of Art, Science and Technology, at Copenhagen, Denmark, 29 October-1 November 2013 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258277478_Saccadic_Universe_eye-gaze_controlled_navigation_to_the_landscapes_images, access: 31 July 2014).

Tchalenko, John

2013 “Capturing life” (documentary), Factum Foundation (http://www.factumfoundation.org/pag/212/John-Tchalenko-br-Capturing-Life, actualización: 2013, access: 9 March 2014).

Wallraven, Christian; Cunningham, Douglas W.; Rigau, Jaume; Feixas, Miquel; Sbert, Mateu

2009 “Aesthetic appraisal of art - from eye movements to computers,” Computational Aesthetics 2009, Eurographics Workshop on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging, Dieter W. Fellner, Werner Hansmann, Werner Purgathofer y François Sillion, editores, Ginebra, Eurographics Association, pp. 137-144 (http://www.kyb.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/files/publications/CAe2009-Wallraven_5740[0].pdf, access: 23 March 2014).

Zirnsak, Marc; Moore, Tirin

2014 “Saccades and shifting receptive fields: anticipating consequences or selecting targets?,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Elsevier), vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 621-628 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661314002137#, access: 18 December 2014).

Article Abstract Art as a Universal Language?

Article Disambiguating Complex Visual Information: Towards Communica...

Conference Paper Saccadic Universe: eye-gaze controlled navigation to the lan...

Simon: from the reference list I posted above, Perhaps you would particularly enjoy the video by John Tchalenko, which illustrates some of the possibilities in looking at the production of art with Eye-Tracking Devices.

Sorry, Simon, I neglected to answer your question about native art in central Mexico at the time of the Conquest. The indigenous concept straddles the blurry border between modern European semantic categories of the visual arts and writing. If you look up words like "pintura" (painting) and "escritura" (writing) in the many Castilian-native language lexicons that were produced by friars and their native collaborators in the early colonial period, you usually get the same word in the native languages, for example tlahcuilolli in Nahuatl, Ofo in Otomi, and ts'ib in Yucatecan Maya. There are also metaphorical couplets, like in tlilli in tlapalli in Nahuatl (with the same meanings as mayati neku_hu_ in Otomi; the u's should be underlined, but I can't do that with this inteface). Both phrases mean "the black ink, the colored paint," with three levels of meaning: (1) the pigments themselves, on a literal level; (2) the painted figures, in screenfold books or other surfaces; and (3) the wisdom of the ancestors that were contained, conserved, and expressed in the paintings. There is an article in Castilian on this metaphor here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233808654_La_tinta_negra_la_pintura_de_colores

After the conquest, the native semantic category gradually gave way to the separate Western categories of "art" and "writing." Of course, "art" didn't have the same meaning in 1800 as it has today; this and related concepts have been quite polysemic throughout time and space, even within specific temporal and spacial limits.

Article La tinta negra, la pintura de colores

Hi David

I am humbled by your extensive replies to my somewhat off the cuff note. Of course, as always, I enthusiastically endorse and encourage your radically interdisciplinarity. I am in agreement with your use of Castillian and the politics of language. Its clear from you notes on Nahuatl, Otomi, etc that the issues I raised are well understood.

"Working out a basic definition of what we mean by art, across the temporal, geographic, cultural, and social ranges of our species, is part of this problem. The least fruitful avenue here, at least for this observer, is an elitist view based on as assumed superior aesthetic sensitivity. I have a tentative working definition, for now in Castilian"

I'd be interested to see it. I recall the definition of Donald Brook, an  art theorist when I was a student: "Non-specific experimental modelling"

I'm fascinated by your remarkable bibliography, and do not have a lot to add right now. My feeling is that for students, it may be short on the more philosophical end of cognitive science. I recommend some of the collaboration of Alva Noe and Kevin Oregan - see attached.

best

Simon

Turning the question on its head a bit - regarding the paper on dislexics, I'm no expert on the subject but I understand that saccadic behavior among some autistic people is bafflingly random, or at least follows patterns we do not understand. Eyetracking will tell you at least as much a both individual differences. A conventional response would be to ignore the outliers. I think it would be a poor choice in your research. I assume, also, you will take reference base line recordings of each subject looking at non-art scenes. Also there is the question of looking at an image vs  looking at a space. (Illusionistic) pictures are just that, and in even somewhat schematic representations of spatial depth, we do some remarkable mental gymnastics to see 'depth' in a perspectival image, and this is most definitely culturally learned and not innate.

Simon: Thanks for the paper, which is a gem, with the added attraction of all the high-level commentary at the end! It led me to O'Regan's web page, with links to other studies along these lines: http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/

Thanks also for your additional thoughts on the possible applications of Eye-Tracking studies and of 2D vs. 3D perception. This is all very important.

The bibliography I provided was tailored for this question on Eye-Tracking Devices. I have other thematic bibliographies on consciousness studies, visual perception, neuroaesthetics, and the application of the latter field to art education and art production. This is all just preliminary information detection and gathering; it will take years of work with graduate students for something relevant to emerge. The course, El Arte en la Mente Encarnada ("Art in the Embodied Mind"), will begin in 16 days, if enough students sign up.

Meanwhile, my generous colleagues at ResearchGate have been, and continue to be, my teachers. I might even go so far as to say that the preparation of this course would have been impossible for me without the support of this virtual community of scholars, since my previous exposure to this line of inquiry had been rather superficial. Thanks to all who are reading this!

"The course, El Arte en la Mente Encarnada ("Art in the Embodied Mind"), will begin in 16 days, if enough students sign up."

that sounds wonderful. I hope its a huge success - I'd love to see a syllabus/course outline

Jaimes, A., & Chang, S.-F. (2000). Conceptual framework for indexing visual information at multiple levels. In Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering (Vol. 3964, pp. 2–15). Retrieved from http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-0033909136&partnerID=40&md5=4f8011438d72890cd6baa9701f4cb0a9 Have you seen this article? We did a project based on this model focusing on x-ray images. The authors describe perceptual/syntactic features as those that are derived only from the image itself and not requiring information not explicitly obtained from the image. But the things they include in this category are Type/technique of the image, global distribution, local structure and global composition. As an artist, do you agree that these classes do not require special knowledge to process visual information at this level? Carla

Hi, David,

Hello Carla,

not answering for David - but -

as an artist, and someone reasonably well informed in cognitive, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, the question which preoccupies me in this conversation is "why are we treating 'looking at art' as a special kind of looking?" And with respect to what?

Until we answer that question, it seems to me that any experimental 'findings' will be dubious and any  decision to follow a particular methodology 'topsy-turvy' or theoretically dubious.

It seems that scientist are often willing to accord something they call 'art' special status. Some artists have 'science-envy' and some scientists have 'art-envy'. Both seem based in some sort of insecurity and probably anachronistic information. For instance, take Joseph Kosuth's canonical conceptual art work 'one and three chairs' which consisted of: a chair, a black and white photograph of the chair, and a textual description of the chair. All three were chosen to avoid any aesthetic quality. It was an ordinary chair, the photograph was deadpan.

The specific point is that while being 'art' the work sought to avoid any of the trappings of 'art'. That is a general characteristic of progressive art. For the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago, a couple of guys dragged a row boat over the alps.

The general point - if we are talking about 'art' from a vision point of view, 'art vision' is  no different from any other kind of vision because 'art' can take any form - or non-form.

If on the other hand, we are talking about 'looking at pictures', then lets try to be clear about what distinguishes an art picture from a non-art picture. I suspect we would be drawn into the same kind of regress because many artists, perverse as they are, try to make art pictures indistinguishable from non-art pictures. I had a grad student whose graduation work consisted of the restaging of mail-order catalog pictures, pictures which have no pretense to art.

best

Simon

Thanks, Simon.  I am particularly interested in how people look at medical images - which can be pretty, but are definitely not art :) Jaimes' work (which comes out of engineering) separates image content into syntactic/perceptual features and semantic/visual concept features. At first glance, this makes sense to me, because there are meanings that are only conveyed by an image if the viewer has certain background knowledge. They assert, however, that there are certain aspects of an image that all people perceive regardless of their background knowledge. They include in this "perceptual" category, the type of image (photo, drawing, painting, etc), color, texture, contrast, dot, line, centering, balance, and symmetry. In our study of x-ray images, these image features were present, but the subjects did not identify them unless they were given a semantic reason for focusing on these traits. I am interested to know if people in the art world routinely look at these "low level" image feature or if they need a higher level reason to focus on things like this.

Carla

> Jaimes' work (which comes out of engineering) separates image content into syntactic/perceptual features and semantic/visual concept features

I'm immediately skeptical because I'd like to know the theoretical basis in which these classes are distinguished

> interested to know if people in the art world routinely look at these "low level" image feature or if they need a higher level reason to focus on things like this.

I would hazard a guess that the question does not occur to most of them and  if it did they would reject it as being too 'sciency'. This kind of question was popular in 'art and psychology of perception' work in the 60s. Ernst Gombrich was a central figure. As for whether this does occur neurologically, I do not know,

I think a wonderful book on how art and vision interact by Margaret Livingstone is "Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing". The author explains the neural mechanisms behind visual perception and illusions with fun examples the reader can do to experience these effects for themselves. I think the discussion here, with regards to Yarbus's work, is trying to get at how we control eye movements in different tasks. There is still debate on whether eye movement control is saliency-based (the eyes fixate on visual features, contrasts, luminance, edges) or object-based (the eyes are drawn to objects) within scenes but there isn't much on how art affects eye movement patterns unfortunately. 

Below are some references for categorization of a task using eye movements:

Boot, W. R., Becic, E., & Kramer, A. F. (2009). Stable individual differences in search strategy?: The effect of task demands and motivational factors on scanning strategy in visual search. Journal of Vision, 9(3), 7–7. doi:10.1167/9.3.7

Greene, M. R., Liu, T., & Wolfe, J. M. (2012). Vision Research. Vision Research, 62(C), 1–8. doi:10.1016/j.visres.2012.03.019

Henderson, J. M., Shinkareva, S. V., Wang, J., Luke, S. G., & Olejarczyk, J. (2013). Predicting Cognitive State from Eye Movements. PloS One, 8(5), e64937. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064937.g004

Carla: I managed to download a copy of the article and gave it a quick look-over. I don't think I understand your question fully, as most any task requires special knowledge. At any rate, my answer would be yes, that a researcher needs specialized theoretical and practical knowledge, as well as experience, drawn from a variety of disciplines. What sort of knowledge would depend on the specific task at hand.

The few times I have created databases for indexing images from a given corpus, I have created categories that are directly related to the questions I was asking. The results were quite useful, indispensible in fact, for finding the answers. One was a collection of archival images from the 16th to the 19th centuries, all from the central Mexican states of Guanajuato and Querétaro. In this case the task was fairly simple; I just wanted to be able to handle variables like space, time, materials, location in the archive, published references, and such (a summary is available -in Castilian- here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236851210_Mapas_planos_e_ilustraciones_de_Guanajuato_y_Quertaro_en_el_Archivo_General_de_la_Nacin). Three others were digital catalogs of pictorial signs in manuscripts painted in Otomí towns in the early colonial period; in the latter case I was looking at the relations between picture writing, language, and culture. A simplified version of these databases -again in Castilian- may be found in volume 2 of my doctoral thesis (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236900081_Los_otomes_cultura_lengua_y_escritura_%28vol._2%29), and its application to the research in volume 1 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236900046_Los_otomes_cultura_lengua_y_escritura_%28vol._1%29).

Article Mapas, planos e ilustraciones de Guanajuato y Querétaro en e...

Thesis Los otomíes: cultura, lengua y escritura (vol. 2)

Thesis Los otomíes: cultura, lengua y escritura (vol. 1)

Simon: I agree that looking at art is like looking at anything else, but looking at distinct classes of things (or scenes, or acts, or sequences of occurances, or whatever) must involve differences in what is going on in our minds, brains, and bodies in general. Beyond the act of looking, we should consider the phenomenal experience of seeing, and then feeling art, on an aesthetic level. Of course this all depends on what we mean by "art." I see what you are getting at, though. I suppose most people with limited contact with the world of contemporary art, when they read or hear the word "art" would tend to think of oil paintings, bronze sculptures, and the like. A lot of the published literature on eye tracking and art, and on neuroaesthetics, focuses on such traditional formats. The examples you provided could be used to expand the scope of inquiry and produce research results that are more interesting and useful to contemporary art students (I should say "students of the arts;" that would give a more expanded view, just by the addition of a letter 's').

But getting back to the question that originated this thread, which deals specifically with eye tracking devices and art, here we are focusing more on the act of looking than on seeing or feeling. Of course these are just parts of a single perceptual process, but it's fun to break it down and look at each part, using an analytical approach. Trying to understand the neurological underpinnings of each of these three parts can surely help us think more clearly and precisely about how we experience art.

Jenn, thanks for your valuable contribution. Margaret Livingstone's book The biology of seeing is a jewel; besides a clear and refreshingly nonpedantic text, the illustrations are colorful, crisp, and fresh, and the book as a whole is an shining example of what editorial design and production can be. When I need to get a bit more technical, at this incipient stage of my formation (that made me laugh at myself, since I'm 58 years old), I pull down R. W. Rodieck's book The first steps in seeing (Sunderland, Sinauer Associates, 1998).

I'll have a look at the references you provided when I can manage to have a little quality time with my PC.

Hello David

I do not want to hijack this thread, but to reply to your -

"I suppose most people with limited contact with the world of contemporary art, when they read or hear the word "art" would tend to think of oil paintings, bronze sculptures, and the like. A lot of the published literature on eye tracking and art, or neuroaesthetics, focuses on such traditional formats. The examples you provided could be used to expand the scope of inquiry and produce research results that are more interesting and useful to contemporary art students"

Yes, I agree, this is a major limitation of neuroaesthetics, and the main reason why it is lampooned in the art world - it tends to be locked into C19th conceptions of art.

Simon

Don't worry about hijacking the thread, Simon; your comments are always as welcome as they are thought-provoking. As far as the breach between "art" and "science," I think we need to think far beyond traditional academic categories, as the universe is one (just as we need to think beyond nationalisms and focus on the fundamental biological unity of our species). This breach wasn't significant until relatively recent times (in historical perspective) and it seems to be closing somewhat, perhaps as a consecuence of the current revolution in communication technologies and access to information, as well as the slowly emerging recognition of the value of the transdisciplinary perspective. Or maybe that's just my view from an academic ivory tower. I confess, though, that one motivation for setting up the graduate course I mentioned a few posts ago is to provide a good answer to art students who insist that "Art has nothing to do with science." My painting teacher said the same words to me in 1980, when I suggested using color terminology based on research in the area of the psychology of perception. I replied that artists should use all resources available to them. He shouted "You teach the goddamn class" and stomped out of the studio!

>I think we need to think far beyond traditional academic categories, 

I agree, but interdisciplinarity is not easy, intellectually or psychologically, it requires a willingness to see outside of the silo, obviously, but more importantly, to subject one's own assumptions to the criteria of other disciplines. This is not something the intelectually complacent are willing to do.

>"You teach the goddamn class" and stomped out of the studio!

oh, dear. maybe he was right. :)

"it requires a willingness to see outside of the silo, obviously, but more importantly, to subject one's own assumptions to the criteria of other disciplines."

This is true, Simon. One way to do this is to present papers in congresses organized by practitioners of other disciplines. Besides having the opportunity to exchange ideas, one gets tough feedback during the review processes for selecting participants and for publishing in the proceedings. Crossing disciplinary boundaries is not something to take lightly. It requires getting inside and doing some serious reading, writing, and conversing.

I am convinced that there is a common denominator, a set of basic ground rules for evidence-based reasoning, which holds up across all disciplines that have any pretension of being scientific. Aesthetic creation involves other aspects of human potential, but there are many aspects of the creative process that can be better understood, and manipulated, from a scientific perspective.

I really like this conversation and one researcher that has always interested me in this area is Velichovsky. He carried out a study some years ago comparing eye movements when viewing art alone and when given information on a previous viewer's gaze, it is thought this attentional landscape can be used to communicate personal views of a scene. There seems to be some museum research out there relating to this and it certainly seems to capture some of the subjective aspects of art viewing using eye-tracking that may be the crossover you are looking for?

Pomplun, M., Ritter, H. & Velichkovsky,B.M. (1996). Disambiguating complex visual information: Towards communication of personal views of a scene. Perception, 25(8), 931-948. Link to abstract

http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=p250931

http://ewic.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_ev12_s2paper3.pdf

Iperception. 2010;1(1):7-27. doi: 10.1068/i0382. Epub 2010 Jul 12.

Yarbus, eye movements, and vision.

Tatler BW1, Wade NJ, Kwan H, Findlay JM, Velichkovsky BM.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23396904

Front Psychol. 2014 Mar 17;5:210. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00210. eCollection 2014.

Eye movements when viewing advertisements.

Higgins E1, Leinenger M1, Rayner K1.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24672500

Emma: This is great. I'll take a good look at these studies and integrate them into the growing corpus. Thank you!

Emma: I have all four articles and have given them a quick read. They are all full of very useful information. Thanks again!

I was considering buying a used copy of the classic, out-of-print book by Alfred L. Yarbus, so I was delighted to find a freely available PDF copy a few minutes ago:

Yarbus, Alfred L., Eye movements and vision, Basil Haigh (translator), Lorrin A. Riggs (translation editor), New York, Plenum Press, 1967(http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/yarbus%20(1967)%20eye%20movements%20and%20vision.pdf, access: January 22, 2015).

There are a lot of digital copies of publications on related topics on the same web site, belonging to Mark Wexler:

http://wexler.free.fr/index.shtml

I agree, David. I just got a copy of "Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing" as recommended by Jenn Olejarczyk and it is fascinating! Thanks for the recommendation.

You're welcome, Carla. In fact, it's on my desk now, and I plan on reading all the way through it after finishing the articles in Is the visual world a grand illusion (just two articles to go) and Varela, Thompson & Rosch's book The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. I guess Yarbus can wait in line meanwhile. (The terrible thing is that I have committed myself to producing a critical edition of an 18th century manuscript and a paper on early colonial native pictorial codices, all in the next few months; sometimes I think I'm spreading myself to thin. I guess the next step is to get the situation under control and try to work on one project at a time. Strangely, all these areas of inquiry seem to complement each other somehow.)

The fourth section of the bibliography I recently translated into English and uploaded to ResearchGate includes some recent sources on eye movements: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280949470_Art_in_the_embodied_mind_a_bibliography_%28updated_August_14_2015%29

Data Art in the embodied mind: a bibliography (updated August 14, 2015)

Hi David,

I did some in 1996. You may find information on the series 'transparent', which concerns Renaisance paintings, respectively the question wheather the eye follows the painting's geometrical plan, on my webpage: http://www.angelika-boeck.de/en/works/eye-tracking/

Here you can download some related texts: http://www.angelika-boeck.de/en/publications/single-page-publications/spuren-des-sehens/ 

http://www.angelika-boeck.de/publikationen/single-page-publikationen/in-between-glances/

There was an exhibition recently in Dublin (which will be continued at the Frost Museum of Science in Miami this April): http://www.angelika-boeck.de/publikationen/single-page-publikationen/seeing-what-are-you-looking-at/

Best,

Angelika

Thanks, Angelika. I enjoyed reading about and looking at pictures of your work. You have been doing some amazing things! This sort of application of science in artistic production is exactly what I've been looking for, for my own benefit and to share with my students. 

Here is an updated version of the bibliography, the link to which I posted on this thread a year and a half ago. The title has changed, the thematic sections are restructured, and there are lots of additional references. Section 4 is about eye movements.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312320657_Embodied_cognition_and_aesthetic_experience_a_bibliography

Data Embodied cognition and aesthetic experience: a bibliography

David, thank you for this question, and to the contributors. I will study the sources. may I turn the equation around and ask how artworks 'look' at viewers. I have found a universal structure or five layers in all complex artworks, that are subconscious and compulsive to artists, and to viewers. The third layer is the persistent presence of an ocular axial grid (eyes of opposite pairs of characters, usually sixteen, thus eight axes, always cross in one point; with two constant exceptions; one character has his chest or heart instead of eye on the grid, and one character adjacent to this has her womb, usually pregnant, on the ocular grid).

I well know that this revelation is novel, and that is sounds improbable. however demonstrate 200 examples in my book Mindprint (2014, Lulu.com), and list 200 more in the index; and posted about a hundred more on websites such as www.mindprintart.wordpress.com and www.stoneprintjournal.wordpress.com

And will gladly demonstrate the same in any artwork of your choice, provided that it is a clear image, of a whole panel or recognised work, and contains eleven or more characters (animals, people, therianthropes, images of images or statues).

Technology to recognise eyes in digital images are widely used.

Eyes are one of the focal points that compulsively draw the eyes of viewers.

Artists are now demonstrated to place on average 14 of 16 eyes (or 10 of 12 eyes in minimal works), in a very specific relationship to one another.

Different brain and neuro areas are involved, than in conscious functions.

Thus I am looking for a developer to automate my analysis method, starting with the ocular axial grid; identifying the potential chest and womb; adding labels for the standard list of types to the characters; prompting users to enter names or types of characters into the standard format analysis caption (such as Mary, lion, dog, hero, arms up, bent neck, etc).

There are more things in artworks and dreams, that are listed in books.

You're welcome, Edmond. Thank you for sharing your work. Indeed, much of what we think we know about what we call "art" needs to be rethought, particularly in the light of recent developments in cognitive science, considering the entire mind-body-environment-culture dynamic system, in all of its complexity.

The aesthetic notion of "movement" in a painting can easily be explained as the number and velocity of eye movements a viewer makes by looking at it. (is there a difference art - other objects?) 

Willy: I think eye movements are one variable among many, the study of which can help us tighten up our conceptual categorizations of "visual art" and "aesthetic experience", in both universal and culturally specific perspectives.