The CReA Lab

CReA was founded in 2006 by Raphael Rosenberg at the Institute for European Art History at the University of Heidelberg, and is widely regarded as the first eye tracking laboratory embedded within an art history department. Two years later, its first published account of eye tracking research appeared (Rosenberg et al. 2008). The collective work of the Heidelberg team was brought to fruition in an interdisciplinary journal (Engelbrecht et al. 2010). Since 1 September 2009, the lab has been based at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna.

The lab grew out of a conviction that the empirical study of gaze is not foreign to art history, but continuous with it. Descriptions of how viewers move their eyes across paintings appear in art literature as far back as the 6th century, and recur throughout the writings of Diderot, Wölfflin, and others. What eye tracking adds is the ability to measure these movements directly — to verify, refine, or challenge the assumptions that art historians have long made about how artworks are seen. Rosenberg has termed this broader programme Empirische Bildwissenschaft (Rosenberg 2009, 2011, 2014), described in English as “cognitive research in art history” (Rosenberg 2016; Rosenberg & Klein 2015).

Vienna proved a fertile ground for eye movement research. CReA has engaged and established a longstanding collaboration with empirical aesthetics researchers and art psychologists (Rosenberg & Leder 2014). By the early 2020s, a growth in published output marked the lab's consolidation as a genuinely interdisciplinary research group (Rosenberg & Groner 2020).

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is an empirical method of recording the eye movements of a person looking at a given stimulus. We use this technique to track gaze patterns while beholding artworks – either in the lab with high quality reproductions on a computer screen (remote eye tracker) or with original artworks in museums (mobile eye tracker: Santini et al. 2018). Eye trackers are non-invasive devices based on infrared cameras. They track the movements of the pupil and the corneal reflection and extrapolate the individual gaze path over the art work. This gaze path is then broken down into eye movement events for further analysis, of which the most common are fixations and saccades.

During a fixation the gaze hovers in a small, contained area for approx. 300 ms. This is most commonly associated with cognitive attention to that area and an intake of visual information. The saccade moves the gaze from one fixation to another; it normally lasts less than 100 ms and is one of the fastest movements our bodies are capable of. During a saccade we are essentially blind. The analysis of these events gives us a better understanding of what happens in the interaction between a viewer and a work of art. We can see what draws the viewer’s attention, in what order and from what direction they “read” the composition and/or narrative of the work, as well as what they don’t see and behaviors they don’t exhibit that we might have expected.

Eye tracking is an innovative and promising methodological approach in Art History. So far we have used eye tracking to study single artworks (Aufreiter 2014), check art historical theories that often speculate about specific forms of viewing (Brinkmann et al. 2014, Rosenberg 2014), compare how age (Brüner 2017), gender, expertise (Rosenberg 2011), and culture influence the viewing of artworks, and asses the effects of contextual circumstance (Klein et al. 2014, Brieber et al. 2014, Pitnik 2017). However, much research remains to be done in this emerging approach to visual culture. Eye tracking opens many novel avenues for investigating Art Historical materials and provides a first-hand perspective of our reception and interaction with works of art.