van Leeuwen Janneke E P, Crutch Sebastian J, Warren Jason D
Dementia Research Centre, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
The Thinking Eye, ACAVA Limehouse Art Foundation, London, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2023 Sep 27;14:1222608. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1222608. eCollection 2023.
The foundation of art processes in the social brain can guide the scientific study of how human beings perceive and interact with their environment. Here, we applied the theoretical frameworks of the social and artistic brain connectomes to an eye-tracking paradigm with the aim to elucidate how different viewing conditions and social cues influence gaze patterns and personal resonance with artworks and complex imagery in healthy adults. We compared two viewing conditions that encourage personal or social perspective taking-modeled on the well-known Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method-to a viewing condition during which only contextual information about the image was provided. Our findings showed that the viewing conditions that used VTS techniques directed the gaze more toward highly salient social cues (Animate elements) in artworks and complex imagery, compared to when only contextual information was provided. We furthermore found that audio cues also directed visual attention, whereby listening to a personal reflection by another person (VTS) had a stronger effect than contextual information. However, we found no effect of viewing condition on the personal resonance with the artworks and complex images when taking the random effects of the image selection into account. Our study provides a neurobiological grounding of the VTS method in the social brain, revealing that this pedagogical method of engaging viewers with artworks measurably shapes people's visual exploration patterns. This is not only of relevance to (art) education but also has implications for art-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
社会大脑中艺术加工的基础能够指导关于人类如何感知环境以及与环境互动的科学研究。在此，我们将社会大脑和艺术大脑连接组的理论框架应用于一项眼动追踪范式，旨在阐明不同的观看条件和社会线索如何影响健康成年人对艺术作品和复杂图像的注视模式以及个人共鸣。我们将两种鼓励个人或社会视角采择的观看条件——以著名的视觉思维策略（VTS）方法为模型——与仅提供有关图像的背景信息的观看条件进行了比较。我们的研究结果表明，与仅提供背景信息时相比采用VTS技术的观看条件会使注视更多地指向艺术作品和复杂图像中高度突出的社会线索（有生命的元素）。我们还发现音频线索也会引导视觉注意力，即聆听他人的个人反思（VTS）比背景信息的影响更强。然而，当考虑到图像选择的随机效应时我们发现观看条件对与艺术作品和复杂图像的个人共鸣没有影响。我们的研究为社会大脑中的VTS方法提供了神经生物学基础，揭示出这种让观众参与艺术作品的教学方法可显著塑造人们的视觉探索模式。这不仅与（艺术）教育相关，而且对基于艺术的诊断和治疗应用也有影响。
