Looking at images with an aesthetic orientation: What’s special about it? M Nadal1, M Forster2, M Paul1, H Leder2 |
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1Department of Basic Psychological Research, University of Vienna, Austria |
| We often visually explore objects, other people, or our environments with the purpose of evaluating their aesthetic qualities. Although previous research has examined people’s eye movements while exploring paintings, little is known about what makes this aesthetic way of looking at the world special, if anything. A long tradition within empirical aesthetics regards complexity as a crucial factor influencing the aesthetic appreciation of visual stimuli, but to what extent does it impact the way people explore images with an aesthetic orientation? In this talk we present an eye tracking experiment aimed at determining whether participants deploy specific exploratory strategies when asked to rate the beauty of visual stimuli (aesthetic orientation), and to compare them to those used when they are asked to appraise the complexity of the same stimuli (pragmatic orientation). Our results showed that participants’ exploration patterns, as measured by fixation count and duration, were determined by a complex interaction of bottom-up processes, related with the degree of realism and artistry of the stimuli, and processes determined by the task (judging beauty or complexity). Our results also clarify the effects of different complexity dimensions on beauty and complexity judgments, as well as the temporal unfolding of such effects. |
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