Art professionals experience unique perception in painting evaluation
Naoko Koide (1361003)
Art professionals have different visual perception from novices when viewing and evaluating paintings. Previous findings indicate that art professionals attend less to general objects such as a car or a face than novices, and attend to visual effects such as color composition or background in a painting. The visual effects, however, do not have unified objective aspects. To obtain the unified aspects, we examined the difference in visual processing between art professionals and novices by using computational models. In this thesis, we reported two studies. The first study is for eye scan-path when viewing abstract paintings. If art professionals have their own knowledge for painting evaluation, their fixations should have less contribution of stimulus-driven visual selection even when viewing paintings that do not have semantic objects. To quantify this contribution, we calculated consistency between the fixations and an artificial map, which predicts fixations based on stimulus-driven visual selection. The results showed that the art professionals had less consistency than the novices. This implies that art professionals may conduct knowledge-based visual selection when viewing abstract paintings. In the second study, we examined the difference in categorization of paintings between art professionals and novices. In our experiments, art professionals and novices arranged 144 paintings according to subjective dissimilarities. Then for each participant, we examined which computational models had high correlation with the behavioral data. The results showed that the art professionals had lower correlation with the object-representation model. This implies that art professionals suppress high-level visual perception in categorization of paintings. From the findings of the two studies, painting perception of art professionals relates to inter mediate visual processing.