Visual fixation patterns of artists and novices in abstract painting observations

Artists have a specific evaluation of abstract paintings while art novices do that with difficulty. This difference is shown in eye fixation patterns, although the cause is not clear. To explain the difference in fixation patterns, we used one of the saliency maps of paintings which predict fixations well without prior knowledge such as a meaningful target. If artists had a deep knowledge of art, they attend less to the salient features than novices in observing abstract paintings. On the other hand, the fixation patterns possibly vary in visual tasks. Therefore we examined the effect of salient features in two tasks: free viewing and preference judgment. To evaluate this quantitatively, the correlation coefficient (CC) between fixation distribution and a saliency map was used. The CCs were compared between artists and novices for each task. We found that the CCs of artists were lower than those of novices in the free viewing task, but not in the preference judgment task. This implies that the artist´s knowledge of observation paintings was appeared only in free viewing.