This study examined the effect of inaccurate perspective on the impression of paintings by means of the protocol analysis of observers’ free talking. Participants observed two paintings by renowned artists used as stimuli in two conditions, either simultaneously (Exp.1) or with 1-week interval (Exp.2). In the original condition, they were presented in their original form drawn in inaccurate per...

We used event-related fMRI to investigate whether recollection- and familiarity-based memory judgments are modulated by the degree of visual similarity between old and new art paintings. Subjects performed a flower detection task, followed by a Remember/Know/New surprise memory test. The old paintings were randomly presented with new paintings, which were either visually similar or visually dif...

In the present study, we examined the eye movement behaviour of children and adults looking at five Van Gogh paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The goal of the study was to determine the role of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes in the first stages of participants' aesthetic experience. Bottom-up processes were quantified by determining a salience map for each painting. Top...

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...