title: Art in the eye of the beholder: the perception of art during monocular viewing.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To explore whether monocular viewing affects judgment of art.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Each superior colliculus receives optic nerve fibers primarily from the contralateral eye, and visual input to each colliculus activates the ipsilateral hemisphere. In previous studies, monocular viewing influenced performance on visual-spatial and verbal memory tasks.
  
  
  METHODS
  Eight college-educated subjects, 6 men and 2 women, monocularly viewed 10 paintings with the right eye and another 10 with the left. Subjects had not previously seen the paintings. Each time, 5 paintings were abstract expressionist and 5 were impressionist. The orders of eye viewing and painting viewed were pseudorandomized and counterbalanced. Subjects rated on a 1 to 10 scale 4 qualities of the paintings: representation, aesthetics (beauty), novelty, and closure (completeness).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Paintings in the abstract expressionist style had a significant difference in the rating of novelty; the paintings were rated more novel when viewed with the left eye than with the right eye. There was a trend for rating paintings as having more closure when viewing with the right eye than with the left. Impressionist paintings show no differences.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Monocular viewing influences artistic judgments; novelty being rated higher when viewed with the left eye. Asymmetric projections from each eye and hemispheric specialization are posited to explain these differences.
authors.affiliation: Memory and Cognitive Disorders Program, Department of Neurology, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL 32610-0236, USA. finney@neurology.ufl.edu
authors.forename: Glen Raymond
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: Finney
authors.forename: Kenneth M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Heilman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001154:Art; D001288:Attention; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D004954:Esthetics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010466:Perceptual Closure; D015349:Vision, Monocular