Difference of fixation patterns between artists and laymen in abstract painting observation
Naoko Koide (1151046)
Artists have different fixation patterns from those of laymen in observation of paintings, although the cause is not clear. This may be caused by the difference of visual attention. Laymen possibly attend to early salient features more than artists who have more knowledge with respect to observing paintings. Another possibility is the fixation repetition. As has been observed in skilled readers fixating on words with fewer repetitions, artists may have less repetitions than laymen. To evaluate these possibilities, we compared fixations of artists and laymen in abstract paintings observation focusing on two points: One is the correlation coefficient (CC) between the fixation distribution and a saliency map. The other is the autocorrelation of the fixation points as a time series (Time correlation, TC). As results, the CCs of artists were lower than those of laymen, although the TCs were not different between them. It indicates that laymen tend to pay attention to early salient features more than artists. The disparity could be cased by the difference of fixation patterns.