Citation: Francuz P, Zaniewski I, Augustynowicz P, Kopiś N and Jankowski T (2018) Eye Movement Correlates of Expertise in Visual Arts. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 12:87. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00087 The aim of this study was to search for oculomotor correlates of expertise in visual arts, in particular with regard to paintings. Achieving this goal was possible by gathering data on eye movements of t...

Frames provide a visual link between artworks and their surround. We asked how image properties change as an observer zooms out from viewing a painting alone, to viewing the painting with its frame and, finally, the framed painting in its museum environment (museum scene). To address this question, we determined three higher-order image properties that are based on histograms of oriented lumina...

We examined the hypothesis that rejection automatically elicits defensive physiological reactions in people with low self-esteem (SE) but that attentional control moderates this effect. Undergraduates (N= 67) completed questionnaire measures of SE and attentional control. Their eye-blink responses to startle probes were measured while they viewed paintings related to rejection and acceptance th...

Computational algorithms for measuring thread counts from scanned x-rays produce warp and weft thread count “maps” across entire paintings. Within the database of over 300 van Gogh paintings, we found a clique of 44 warp-weave-matched paintings. By reconstructing the smallest canvas section that could have produced this match, they must span the entire width of a commercial canvas roll (2+ mete...

In the art gallery problem the goal is to place guards (as few as possible) in a polygon so that a maximal area of the polygon is covered. We address here a closely related problem: how to place paintings and guards in an art gallery so that the total value of guarded paintings is a maximum. More formally, a simple polygon is given along with a set of paintings. Each painting, has a length and ...

A series of enigmatic ninthor tenth-century wall paintings from Nishapur in eastern Iran seems to have been imbued with amuletic, apotropaic, or talismanic properties. Recapitulating while exaggerating some of the properties of marble, the paintings also include anthropomorphic and vegetal imagery. Their idiosyncratic iconography seems to highlight a tension between physis and technē that may b...

Indeterminate art invokes a perceptual dilemma in which apparently detailed and vivid images resist identification. We used event-related fMRI to study visual perception of representational, indeterminate and abstract paintings. We hypothesized increased activation along a gradient of posterior-to-anterior ventral visual areas with increased object resolution, and postulated that object resolut...

We compare the properties of intensity and color edges in photographs of real scenes and paintings. We demonstrate that paintings contain significantly more color-only edges, whereas the amount of intensity-only edges does not differ significantly between the two classes. In addition, color edge strength is significantly higher for paintings. The differences between paintings and photographs ar...

Archaeologists often argue whether Paleolithic works of art, cave paintings in particular, constitute reflections of the natural environment of humans at the time. They also debate the extent to which these paintings actually contain creative artistic expression, reflect the phenotypic variation of the surrounding environment, or focus on rare phenotypes. The famous paintings "The Dappled Horse...