When viewing a painting, artists perceive more information from the painting on the basis of their experience and knowledge than art novices do. This difference can be reflected in eye scan paths during viewing of paintings. Distributions of scan paths of artists are different from those of novices even when the paintings contain no figurative object (i.e. abstract paintings). There are two pos...

The University of Lethbridge John R. Vokey Department of Psychology and Neuroscience University of Lethbridge Jason M. Tangen Department of Psychology McMaster University ABSTRACT Judgments of style in art, music, and literature are commonplace, although the mechanisms providing for this structural sensitivity are not well understood. Watanabe, Sakamoto, and Wakita (1995) showed that pigeons tr...

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked whi...

Artists have long explored the way in which we see the world, and they have developed their own tools to portray their vision. The present study investigated whether the compositional information in paintings, an artistic device invented by artists, is utilized when people view paintings. In Experiment 1, we categorized paintings depending on their compositions through experts' ratings. Using t...

How does expertise influence the perception of representational and abstract paintings? We asked 20 experts on art history and 20 laypersons to explore and evaluate a series of paintings ranging in style from representational to abstract in five categories. We compared subjective esthetic judgments and emotional evaluations, gaze patterns, and electrodermal reactivity between the two groups of ...

Recently, a growing interest has emerged for examining the potential of Image Processing tools to assist Art Investigation. Simultaneously, several research works showed the interest of using multifractal analysis for the description of homogeneous textures in images. In this context, the goal of the present contribution is to study the benefits of using the wavelet leader based multifractal fo...

The effects of cleaning treatments on paintings made with synthetic paints are a major concern for conservators of modern and contemporary art. Synthetic paints typically include a complex mixture of additives that are likely to influence the paint’s response to different treatment methods, and their high sensitivity to most organic solvents narrows the choice of products that can be used. Know...

Neural variability in responding to identical repeated stimuli has been related to trial-by-trial fluctuations in ongoing activity, yet the neural and perceptual consequences of these fluctuations remain poorly understood. Using functional neuroimaging, we recorded brain activity in subjects who reported perceptual decisions on an ambiguous figure, Rubin's vase-faces picture, which was briefly ...

With their attractive flowers and wildly diverse forms, orchids are a mainstay of the global floricultural trade. New varieties with improved floral characters and extended vase-life are continuously being generated by classical breeding techniques, though the selection process is necessarily time-consuming and remains a major obstacle to the rapid production of commercially-valuable orchids. M...

Does language play a role in how people interpret and remember causal events? One source of variation in causal event descriptions is agentivity, such as the difference between “She broke the vase” (agentive) vs. “The vase broke” (non-agentive). In this paper, we examined English and Japanese speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events, as well as their memory for the causal age...