Can Visual Artists Regulate Designs to Manipulate Viewers’ Gaze Patterns? an Exploration with Eye-Tracker

Artists and designers use visual strategies like leading lines, perspective, brightness of colors, shapes, relative size, as well as line strengths to regulate the overall viewing experience by controlling where the viewer would look first and then next, the duration of their gaze fixation (or attention) at different parts of the image etc. These strategies can be different for figurative and non-figurative artworks. This study attempts to understand this regulation process using non-figurative and figurative paintings. First, a team of ten artists were asked to create either a figurative or a non-figurative painting each. Next, they were asked to write down their predictions about the sequence and priorities of viewing different visual elements and indicate the visual strategies they consciously used to regulate the gazing behavior. Finally, an eye-tracker study was conducted where thirty participants viewed the ten images and their gaze fixations were analyzed for each image. Results of the study revealed presence of significant relationship between artists’ predictions and actual gaze patterns of the viewers for both non-figurative and figurative paintings, indicating that, to an extent, artists can control the viewers’ perceptual experience of the paintings. However, findings also indicated that sequential gaze fixation is a myth with viewers rapidly moving back and forth among elements, and coexisting visual strategies either compete or complement, with complementary visual strategies leading to better prediction. Findings of this study throw light to the intrinsic relationship between specific visual strategies, eye movements and common perceptual strategies used both by artists and viewers.