Cultural Influence On How Chinese And British Naive Spectators Viewing Paintings

Recent years,researchers have already developed a series of theoretical models that reveal factors and phases constitute aesthetic experiences from the psychological perspective(Leder,Belke,Oeberst,&Augustin.2004;Hofel&Jacobsen,2007),providing comprehensive knowledge on how individuals perceive art.However,most of these findings provide evidence for how westerners perceive western artworks,there are issues that might prevent us from generalizing them directly in eastern cultural context.Firstly,according to previous studies,people who grow up in different cultural backgrounds have different cognitive characters.Generally,westerners focus on the focal objects,while easterners put more emphasis on context and relationships between objects.Secondly,eastern and western artists express art in different ways.For example,eastern paintings usually have higher horizontal lines and wider backgrounds.Western paintings show more detail features of the focal objects,which occupy major areas in the whole picture.Thirdly,individuals with different cultural backgrounds may have different understanding about the stories and scenes depicted in paintings.The present study compared eye movement patterns of Chinese and British observers(untrained)when they viewed Chinese and western paintings,or perceive art with or without titles,to explore whether there are universal or peculiar cognitive characters in processing of paintings.The present study consists of 2 experiments,both of which include encoding session,distraction task and recall session.Experiment 1 manipulated the cultural backgrounds of observers and paintings,using a 2(cultural background:Chinese VS.British)X 2(painting style:Chinese paintings VS.western paintings)between-subject design,to examine whether cognition style of observers and painting styles have effects on aesthetic processing.Experiment 2 used a 2(cultural background:Chinese VS.British)X 2(presentation:blocked with no titles VS.blocked with titles)between-subject design,to test the influence of the titles on viewing paintings.In summary,observers paid more attention on motif areas,where present human figures,during encoding and recalling sessions.It shows that human is the critical informationfor observers to understand and remember paintings with figures.However.we found there were increased fixation counts and duration when people viewed Chinese paintings,and they used a more global strategy.When it comes to western paintings,observers processed human features locally,with a higher accuracy in recognition test.Two groups of observers paid more attention to the backgrounds of paintings created in an incongruous culture,but British observers would be more likely to focus on figures,and perform better than their Chinese counterparts in recall session.Meanwhile,titles can help people to get a better understanding about paintings,but have different influence on Chinese and British observers.