Thinking eyes: visual thinking strategies and the social brain

Abstract

The foundation of art processes in the social brain can guide the scientific study of how human beings perceive and interact with their environment. Here, we applied the theoretical frameworks of the social and artistic brain connectomes to an eye-tracking paradigm with the aim to elucidate how different viewing conditions and social cues influence gaze patterns and personal resonance with artworks and complex imagery in healthy adults. We compared two viewing conditions that encourage personal or social perspective taking-modeled on the well-known Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method-to a viewing condition during which only contextual information about the image was provided. Our findings showed that the viewing conditions that used VTS techniques directed the gaze more toward highly salient social cues (Animate elements) in artworks and complex imagery, compared to when only contextual information was provided. We furthermore found that audio cues also directed visual attention, whereby listening to a personal reflection by another person (VTS) had a stronger effect than contextual information. However, we found no effect of viewing condition on the personal resonance with the artworks and complex images when taking the random effects of the image selection into account. Our study provides a neurobiological grounding of the VTS method in the social brain, revealing that this pedagogical method of engaging viewers with artworks measurably shapes people's visual exploration patterns. This is not only of relevance to (art) education but also has implications for art-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Keywords: VTS; art; artistic brain connectome; eye-tracking; images; social brain; visual attention; visual thinking strategies.

Figure 1

Illustration of the placement of foveal interest areas (FIAs) on the visual artworks and complex imagery used as experimental stimuli. The color coding of the central points of the FIAs is aligned with the two main categories: Animate (orange) and Inanimate (dark green). Separate color coding was applied to Animate FIAs with audio markers (yellow) and Inanimate FIAs with audio markers (light green). The shown example is image #18 (image attribution under Supplementary Table 1, image number 18).

Figure 2

Effects of different viewing conditions and auditory input on gaze patterns across visual artworks and complex imagery in healthy adults. The height of the different colored dwell-time beams represents the estimated average gaze dwell time on Animate (orange) and Inanimate (dark green) image elements, and the subtended angles of the visual field beams represent the proportional representation of these image elements across the image selection. The yellow beams represent the estimated average gaze dwell times (ms) on Animate elements that were specifically referred to in a pre-recorded audio recording that was played simultaneously with the image presentation, and the light green beams represent the estimated average gaze dwell times (ms) on Inanimate image elements with audio references (Note: this only concerned the Contextual information and the External perspective viewing conditions). The lighter sections of the beams correspond with the 95% confidence intervals, and the horizontal lines represent the estimated value in the models. The estimated gaze dwell times for the Internal perspective (VTS) viewing condition were derived from Model 1 (Table 3), and the estimated gaze dwell times for the Contextual information and the External perspective viewing conditions were derived from Model 2 (Table 4).