Abstract
Background: Pupil dilation was shown to reflect the extent of preference in Mondrian painting (Johnson et al., 2010). Objective of this study is to investigate whether the pupillary response reflects aesthetic preference/naturalness in art-paintings (Kondo et al., 2017). Method: All paintings used as the stimulus were selected from WikiArt and categorized into "Abstract", "Flower" and "Poster". Observers were presented either original paintings or hue-flipped ones (180 deg rotated in hue angle). Pupil size was recorded monocularly with EyeLink 1000+ (SR Research, Mississauga, ON, Canada) while presentation of paintings. The preference and naturalness for art-paintings were evaluated subjectively by asking observers to rate preference and naturalness with trackball mouse. 18 observers participated in the experiment. Results and Discussions: In all paintings, observers' pupil constriction rate increased while they viewed hue-flipped paintings compared to the original paintings. In addition, original paintings were preferred and perceived more natural compared to hue-flipped paintings. Moreover, significant correlation was found between preference and naturalness. Hence, we performed a regression analysis to examine the relationship between pupil response and other factors (preference, naturalness and lightness (L* in CIELAB)) in each category. For all paintings categories, pupil constriction was influenced by subjective preference and naturalness. However, the results indicated that mean lightness (L*) was effective only in the category "Poster". In other words, pupil was largely influenced by preference and naturalness rather than lightness (L*) in "Abstract" and "Flower" paintings, suggesting that it is possible to evaluate subjective preference and naturalness by pupil response not just for realistic paintings such as "Flower" but also for abstract paintings.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018