How People View Abstract Art: An Eye Movement Study to Assess Information Processing and Viewing Strategy
Perception of a form is primarily an individualistic experience. Viewing a product may involve perception of its function or an inherent coding of an idea in its form. Perception to an object or an artifact is like having a visual dialog with the form. Th
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Abstract Perception of a form is primarily an individualistic experience. Viewing a product may involve perception of its function or an inherent coding of an idea in its form. Perception to an object or an artifact is like having a visual dialog with the form. The literature suggests that, the visual experience of a work of art, such as painting, is constructed in the same way as the experience of any aspect of the everyday world. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to analyze every aspect of the viewer perception. But, if the viewing aspect itself is observed, it may offer interesting insights, on how the visual dialog to an artifact or designed object is formed by the observer. In this research paper, we aim to explore some of the viewing aspects of viewers, observed through the eye movement research (EMR). The study has been done with 17 participants to establish an understanding in viewing strategy and information processing, while viewing select abstract paintings. Six paintings were used in this study. Selection of the paintings was done as a combination that included Abstract expressionistic paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning, which are spatially spread compositions. Mary Abbot and W. Kandinsky’s directional and vigorous-movement stroke oriented paintings, and Piet Mondrian’s neo-plastic, pure geometrical painting. Images were shown to the participants to investigate viewing strategy through visual attention and exploratory behavior: diverse or specific; in order to understand how abstract art is viewed. It was observed that spatially spread, uniform paintings offered maximum components of information for the viewer to process while pure abstraction evoked high visual search. We further discuss which paintings evoked
S. Sharma Y. (&) B. K. Chakravarthy Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India e-mail: [email protected] B. K. Chakravarthy e-mail: [email protected]
A. Chakrabarti and R. V. Prakash (eds.), ICoRD’13, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1050-4_38, Ó Springer India 2013
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S. Sharma Y. and B. K. Chakravarthy
high attention and discuss qualitatively the possible reasoning. One significant finding is that existence of high information processing may not necessitate a high diverse exploratory behavior. Keywords Eye movement
Visual perception Viewing strategy
1 Introduction Visual response is one of the means to gauge the visual perception of an observer. Eye movement behavior (EMR), since the first works of Yarbus [1], has been used in various fields from reading, usability evaluation, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence to object perception. Though extensive researches have been carried out in eye movement, the understanding is primarily based on viewer’s response to usability, where s/he approaches with a destination or action in mind with response to time. On the contrary, viewing an art object, or a designed form, entails esthetic experience and personal involvement that may not
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