Observing Individuals Viewing Art: The Effects of Titles on Viewers' Eye-Movement Profiles

Understanding the mechanisms underlying the perception of artworks is of significant interest in experimental esthetics. Therefore, in this study, we utilized eye-tracking for investigating how participants familiar and unfamiliar with paintings' titles viewed Kandinsky's abstract and figural artworks. The analysis of behavioral data indicated that knowledge of the title increased participants' liking of the presented paintings and demonstrated a general preference for figural over abstract paintings. Next, we focused the analysis of eye-movement data on areas of the paintings that depict themes associated with their titles. The results demonstrated that participants familiar with the titles viewed these longer and visited them earlier compared with those unfamiliar with paintings' titles. Furthermore, all participants viewed these areas within figural paintings longer and returned to them more often than within abstract paintings. These findings extend previous results by indicating how presenting short titles influences participants' viewing of abstract and figural artworks.