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. 

Introductory Literature:

• Rosenberg, Raphael. "Dem Auge auf der Spur: Blickbewegungen beim Betrachten von Gemälden – historisch und empirisch." In Jahrbuch der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften für 2010, 76–89. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011.
• Rosenberg, Raphael. "Blicke messen: Vorschläge für eine empirische Bildwissenschaft." In Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste 27 (2013), 71–86. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014.
• Rosenberg, Raphael. "Bridging Art History, Computer Science and Cognitive Science: A Call for Interdisciplinary Collaboration." Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 79, no. 3 (2016): 305–314.
• Rosenberg, Raphael, and Rudolf Groner. "Eye Tracking and Visual Arts. Introduction to the Special Thematic Issue." Journal of Eye Movement Research 13, no. 2 (2020): 1-10.
• Rosenberg, Raphael, and Christoph Klein. "The Moving Eye of the Beholder: Eye-Tracking and the Perception of Paintings." In Art, Aesthetics and the Brain, edited by Joseph P. Huston, Marcos Nadal, Francisco Mora, Luigi F. Agnati, and Camilo José Cela-Conde, 79–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Rosenberg, Raphael, and Helmut Leder. "Blickbewegungsforschung." In Bild: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, edited by Stephan Günzel and Dieter Mersch, 433–438. Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2014.