Artists see the Big Picture according to an Eye-tracking Study

Posted by Marshall on March 15, 2007 | Link It

Eye-Tracking has been used a lot in Search Work, specifically to determine why Google has a better search experience than Yahoo or MSN.  Eye-Tracking is also used to study how people actually navigate pages to increase customer satisfaction, goal achievement and conversions.

But this is the first I've seen Eye-Tracking to tell the determine who has Art Training (is an artist) vs. those who don't. I'll certainly need to write this up on ArtNewYorkCity.com too.  Here's two charts.

vart1.jpg 

vart2.jpg

According to Cognitive Daily:

"..So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces. With this in mind, there's little doubt which pictures above show the artist's eye movements — they are the ones to the right, which sweep across the whole picture, not just the human face and figure."

Just think it's interesting that Eye-Tracking can be turned away from the what is being looked at (Website) and back onto the person doing the looking and how they look- and what that means.



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