Culture Writes, Eye Decodes

PhD Project (2025–2029)

How does culture shape the way we look at art? For over a century, art historians, anthropologists and psychologists have been interested in this question. However, the empirical evidence on gaze behaviour in cross-cultural art perception remains unclear. This project builds upon Michael Baxandall's concept of the “period eye” and recent oculometric studies. It tests when and why cultural signatures appear in gaze during art viewing. The study also examines how much these signatures reflect literacy habits (script type, reading direction) versus broader art-related expectations.

The project compares Austrian and Japanese viewers. It also adds Korean and Taiwanese cohorts to disentangle visual-cultural traditions from writing-system effects. We test the perception of European and East Asian paintings, as well as photographs. In addition, the project extends the question developmentally by testing pre-school children cross-culturally. The results will reveal when cultural viewing habits first emerge. They will indicate whether adult patterns are learned with schooling or reflect earlier perceptual priors. Finally, the project aims to specify the boundary conditions of the period eye. It examines when culture-specific expectations govern gaze and when general routines, including literacy, dominate.

This project combines art history and cognitive sciences. It delivers a multi-country, multi-script test of art perception within a single experimental framework. The project clarifies how culture writes the code that the eye decodes.

Team members

• Prof. Dr. Raphael Rosenberg (project supervisor)
• Chao-Shan Hsu, M.A. (coordination, experiement design and cross-site data collection)
• Xingyu Long, M.Sc. (eye-tracking data science, visual analytics)

International partners

• Prof. Dr. Hideaki Kawabata, Aesthetic Psychology Lab (Keio University, Tokyo)
• Prof. Dr. Sang Chul Chong, Vision, Cognition and Concisousness Lab (Yonsei University, Seoul)
• Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jie-Li Tsai, Eye Movement and Reading Laboratory (National Chengchi University, Taipei)