What does eye-tracking research reveal about how people actually look at paintings, and does where we look predict what we find beautiful?
Consider this painting by Johannes Vermeer, a dutch artist who painted the “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. This one’s called “The Art of Painting”, which is a very fitting name considering this article.
Take note of where your eyes first landed. Perhaps the painting in the background between the two people, or the book that the woman is holding?
Was I right?
If I was, it’s not because I am a witch or a telepath, but rather, because of eye-tracking research records.
Here is the heat map, where the red areas show the most viewed regions in the painting, and the green ones being the least.
Pretty amazing, right?
The process of seeing is far from a reproduction of the images striking the retina.
To understand this complex concept, we first need to know:
What is eye-tracking?
Eye-tracking is a technology that measures where a person is looking and how their eyes move.
It uses sensors and light-based tracking, estimating gaze direction with precision, providing objective insight into visual attention.
But why should you know about eye-tracking?
Eye-tracking research matters because it gives us more information on the Eye-Mind Hypothesis, which states that what a person is looking at reflects what they are actively thinking about. It gives us an insight into how the brain prioritises, filters, and consumes information in real time.
It also helps us to fill the subconscious gaps: most of our visual decisions happen completely subconsciously. So if you were to ask someone why they missed a warning sign or chose a product, they literally cannot tell you because their mind registered that movement subconsciously!
To understand more about the way you look at painting and experience it, eye-tracking can be very helpful.
In 1908, Edmund Huey built a device which could track eye movements during the reading process. This was the first eye-tracker in the world. He proved several critical concepts like how our eyes don’t glide over the text but rather move in sudden jumps (saccades), and that proficient readers don’t read every single word in a sentence, sometimes even skipping entire predictable words!
This discovery paved the way for using eye-tracking to understand how we look at artwork. And even helped us draw correlations between how we read, look at paintings, and fundamentally tend to see.
More discoveries were made, like in 1937, the first recordings of eye movements were published by Guy Thomas Buswell. He found out that there was a significant difference between oral and silent reading!
With more advancements, eye-tracking devices became more accurate, and less intrusive. And now here we are, trying to figure out how humans are actually built to see.
Eye-tracking uses cameras or infrared sensors to detect where a person’s eyes are looking.
In simpler terms, a camera tracks the position and movement of the eyes, and detects features such as the pupil and corneal reflection.
Then, software calculates the direction of the person’s gaze .
Researchers focus on where, and for how long a person looks, as well as how their gaze moves.
Terminologies.
Knowing these terms is important for you because they will be used a lot in the latter part of the article, no matter how boring that seems.
Fixation: a period where eyes remain relatively still on a particular point.
Saccade: rapid movement of the eyes from one fixation point to another. This was mentioned earlier.
Dwell time: total time spent looking at a particular area.
Area of Interest (AOI): a specific region researchers define for analysis, such as a person’s face.
Scanpath: the sequence of fixations and saccades as someone looks at something.
Heatmap: a visual representation showing where people looked at most frequently or for the longest.
These terms help us to easily define what we see, but they cannot explain the emotional impact, aesthetic understanding or attention span—because seeing is not looking.
What does it reveal about how we look at paintings?
What can researchers learn from eye-tracking data?
According to Mi3, the sequence of our gaze matters profoundly. It reflects how we make sense of a painting, what moves us, and where our attention lingers.
The order is not trivial, it is a window into how we construct meaning.
Longer fixations suggest that something is receiving more attention or requires more visual/cognitive processing.
More number of fixations in an area can indicate that the viewer repeatedly examines it.
First fixation can tell us about how quickly a particular element captured the viewer’s attention.
Saccades can tell us about how a person explores a painting —do they jump around or move systematically?
Scanpath can reveal the different ways of exploring the same painting.
But here’s where it gets interesting:
Researchers can compare this data with beauty ratings, emotional responses, familiarity, expertise, and memory. And in turn, can tell us more about how a person with specific experiences sees a painting.
Researchers can also ask the question, “Do people who rate paintings as beautiful look at it differently from people who don’t?”
Eye-tracking also shows us that the same ways of seeing can conceal very different ways of looking, and that’s something to think about.
So next time you look at a painting, ask yourself, what draws you in, which area does your eye linger on, and how you construct the meaning of that painting.
Do people tend to be drawn to particular features in a painting?
People are often strongly attracted towards faces. Human figures can also become major anchors in a painting.
High contrast regions, or strong, distinctive colours tend to attract attention because they stand out from their surroundings.
Objects that are visually unusual, large, salient or important can receive more attention.
Areas with sharp edges, boundaries, textures, movement or fine detail can encourage fixations.
Semantic meaning is particularly important. It tells us that what something means to us can influence where we look!
A self-portrait of Van Gogh is ruled by similar visual perception principles as those involved in recognising a familiar face, a cat, or an apple. But then what processes in our brain make art so special?
Art is special because of the history and experience surrounding it. A painting by Van Gogh can make you simultaneously think about his life, whether or not you recognise its style, or what the colours make you feel.
Eye-tracking can give us a small window into that process.
Can different people follow the same patterns when looking at the same artwork?
Yes, people with different tastes, backgrounds, experience, gender and identity can look at the same artworks differently. What might not mean anything to you, might be the most interesting thing to them in that painting.
Men and women.
Women look more at faces and body parts, while men are more interested in postures and actions, according to M and KU Leuven research. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that, on average, women are more empathetic and have greater interest in emotions and social interaction.
Expert and novice.
The expert looks more at the whole, the layman focuses more on certain zones of the painting. And the thing is that you don’t have to have studied art to make yourself an expert. What counts is the fact that you have read a lot about art, and have visited many museums!
What do we find beautiful and can we predict it?
Can we predict what we find beautiful?
Beauty is what touches our hearts.
“By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies or objects, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.”
-Edmund Burke.
Humans generally find natural shapes, vibrant skies, symmetry, and signs of health, like clear skin and bright eyes beautiful. Charm also plays an important role.
Beauty is subjective, we’ve all heard the saying, ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’, and that seems true to me, at least.
People may not necessarily spend more time looking at something they find beautiful, they might just look at that aspect of a painting because it’s unusual or striking.
So, to a degree, we can maybe guess what another person might find beautiful. But eye-tracking research alone cannot tell us that. Researchers can find patterns between what people usually find beautiful. Eye-tracking can then show whether people who rate something as beautiful tend to look at particular regions longer or in particular sequences.
But gaze is not a direct measurement of beauty.
Because beauty also depends on things that eye-tracking cannot discern directly, like memory, culture, emotions, familiarity, and individual taste.
What eye-tracking cannot reveal.
From everything that I’ve read on eye-tracking, I’ve realised that eye-tracking can only tell us about how we look at things. And after knowing what a person was feeling or experiencing, eye-tracking can be used to draw correlations with that.
Here’s what eye-tracking cannot reveal:
Why an individual looked at a certain visual element.
How they felt while looking at the image.
But, eye-tracking can be used in a variety of fields, like psychology, healthcare and neuro marketing. Hence, understanding how and when people look, for understanding how attention is distributed, and being able to see what people attend to or ignore can be crucial for implementing optimal designs, store layouts and displays. In fact, studies have shown that eye-tracking tools can also help in diagnosing autism, as well as other neurological disorders!
Broader Theme
How do humans experience art?
After all these studies on human gaze and attention, can we answer this vital question?
Not completely.
Eye-tracking can tell us a lot about the visible part of looking at art, but experiencing art is larger than that. But that doesn’t mean eye-tracking wasn’t important in this case.
It lets us observe something that was largely invisible previously: the movement of attention while a person looks at something.
Before eye-tracking, you could ask someone, “what did you look at?”, and they wouldn’t be able to answer.
It showed us that looking isn’t random, that different people look at the same thing differently, it let researchers connect looking with emotions and aesthetic ratings, and it challenged the idea that looking at art is passive.
That was the basic premise of the essay. Now, I want you all to visit the painting at the start again.
What do you find yourself returning to?
How does your eye move?
What do you like or dislike?
What do you feel looking at a certain area of the artwork?
Maybe you’ll find it hard to answer these questions while simultaneously enjoying the painting, that’s precisely why eye-tracking is important.
Technology doesn’t give us all the answers in one go, it takes several inventions, interpretations, and methods to arrive at a probable conclusion.