title: Attentional vs computational complexity measures in observing paintings.
abstract: Because of the great heterogeneity of subjects and styles, esthetic perception delineates a special and elusive field of research in vision, which represents an interesting challenge for cognitive science tools. With specific regard to the role of visual complexity, in this paper we present an experiment aimed to measure this dimension in a heterogeneous set of paintings. We compared perceived time complexity measures - based on a temporal estimation paradigm - with physical and statistical properties of the paintings, obtaining a strong correlation between psychological and computational results.
authors.affiliation: Università degli Studi di Palermo, Dipartimento di Psicologia, CITC, 90128 Palermo, Italy. cardaci@unipa.it
authors.forename: Maurizio
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cardaci
authors.forename: Vito
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Di Gesù
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Petrou
authors.forename: Marco Elio
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Tabacchi
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004215:Distance Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008512:Medicine in the Arts; D010151:Paintings; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation