Excellent study, giving a measure to the hard to define area of composition. This eye-movement study confirms a few principles of composition, such as gaze foll

Excellent study, giving a measure to the hard to define area of composition. This eye-movement study confirms a few principles of composition, such as gaze following the direction of various figures (Rembrandt), movement along high-contrast lines (chiaroscuro), movement between chromatic patches (Mondrian studies), focus resting on areas of greater detail (Molina). In the non-square format works you can also see that gaze follows generally along the longest axis, the portrait aspect of the last piece helps drive the gaze up the central axis. These principles are taught, but rarely understood. It becomes a trained instinct to analyze the composition of a work and exploit it in a practice. Another thing I see in this data is a sense of inertia with sight-line. Eyes in motion, prefer to keep moving and seem to gloss over small details to the bigger compositional director. When slowed, these details are observed and the larger compositional elements ignored. Neat! >Eye-tracking recordings were done in 10 subjects (six male, four female; age 23–34) sitting comfortably in front of a 24 inches computer screen, at a distance of about 70 cm, in which different images were shown for 1 min each. Images were digital reproductions (size 1024 × 768 pixels) of original and modified art pieces. My only issue with this approach is that it does not take into account the scale of the work, impasto techniques, light effects or the change in medium (paintings are scanned differently than a typical monitor would, the screen frame may introduce bias). Overall interesting data.