Conference article

The presence of pictures that people recognize as great beyond the borders of cultural differences over 100 years could suggest that such paintings would have certain aesthetic elements in common; and if people are able to recognize them through a shared sense of beauty; it might be able to study what kinds of properties influence people’s evaluation of paintings. This paper investigates influences of motif compositions on impressions of pictures. In the first experiment; participants were asked to answer their impressions of the printings using two kinds of rating scales: information rate scale and semantic differential scale; where “symmetry”; “complexity” and “order” are defined as the elements of “beauty”. Results showed that these three perceptual features influence strongly on people’s impressions. However; this experiment poses some questions. Do participants sense the existence of the golden ratio from motif composition? In recognizing that the ratio had been broken; did their impressions change as a result? Do their impressions change according to degrees of symmetries of motif; no matter if the golden ratio exists? To find answers to these questions; we conduct the second experiment to analyze the relationship between motif compositions and gaze movements detected by an eye-tracking system.

Beauty of Paintings; Motif Composition; Golden Ratio; Eye-tracking