Spectatorship of paintings by naïve viewers

The present thesis proposes a framework for understanding spectatorship of paintings. Specifically, the thesis explores eye movements of naïve viewers on representational paintings over four separate studies. Chapter 1 outlines the framework of spectatorship as described in previous literature. Chapter 2 described the first study of this thesis, exploring how participants looked at portraits when making liking judgments. The results showed that the presence of salient features in the context were positively associated with liking, and greater focus was made to the portrayed faces when the salient features were presented in the context rather than when they were absent. Chapter 3 demonstrates across two experiments that memory representations of painting’s mostly rely on inspecting the paintings theme rather than the context. Only when there is uncertainty the focus on the context increased. The study reported in Chapter 4 explored cultural influence on spectatorship. It did so by comparing British and Chinese participants viewing Western and East Asian representational paintings. Chinese participants were observed to be more influenced by culture (than the British participants), the Chinese spectators presented a relatively greater likelihood of inspection of the context other the theme, but only during discrimination target paintings from foils. Chapter 5 investigates if emphasizing motif category might influence the spectatorship of paintings, by again testing British and Chinese participants. The results showed spectatorship was influenced by efforts to make the motif explicit. For British participants, making the motif of painting explicit increased focus on the painting. In contrast, for Chinese participants, knowledge of the motif decreased focus on the painting. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes and generalizes the findings from empirical work in the preceding chapters, and identifies a number of implications for further work

The spectatorship of portraits by naïve beholders

The spectatorship of portraits by naïve viewers (beholders) was explored in a singleexperiment. Twenty-five participants rated their liking for 142 portraits painted by Courbet (36 paintings), Fantin-Latour (36 paintings) and Manet (70 paintings) on a 4-point Likert scale. The portraits were classified in terms of focussed versus ambiguous nature of sitter gaze and the presence of salient features in the context beyond sitters. Participants rated portraits while having their eye movements recorded. The portraits were split into regions of interest (ROIs) defined by faces, bodies and context. Participants also completed individual difference measures of attention and task focus. Results showed naïve spectatorship to be subject to attentional capture by faces. Paradoxically, the presence of salient features in the context amplified the attentional capture by faces through increasing participants liking of portraits. Attentional capture by faces was also influenced by sitter gaze and task focus. Unsurprisingly, the spectatorship of portraits by naïve beholders is dominated by faces, but the extent of this dominance is influenced by exogenous and endogenous attentional factors