title: Exploring responses to art in adolescence: a behavioral and eye-tracking study.
abstract: Adolescence is a peculiar age mainly characterized by physical and psychological changes that may affect the perception of one's own and others' body. This perceptual peculiarity may influence the way in which bottom-up and top-down processes interact and, consequently, the perception and evaluation of art. This study is aimed at investigating, by means of the eye-tracking technique, the visual explorative behavior of adolescents while looking at paintings. Sixteen color paintings, categorized as dynamic and static, were presented to twenty adolescents; half of the images represented natural environments and half human individuals; all stimuli were displayed under aesthetic and movement judgment tasks. Participants' ratings revealed that, generally, nature images are explicitly evaluated as more appealing than human images. Eye movement data, on the other hand, showed that the human body exerts a strong power in orienting and attracting visual attention and that, in adolescence, it plays a fundamental role during aesthetic experience. In particular, adolescents seem to approach human-content images by giving priority to elements calling forth movement and action, supporting the embodiment theory of aesthetic perception.
authors.affiliation: Research Unit on Psychology of the Art, Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Savazzi
authors.affiliation: Research Unit on Theory of Mind, Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Massaro
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
authors.forename: Cinzia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Di Dio
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy; Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America; IIT (Italian Institute of Technology) Brain Center for Social and Motor Cognition, Parma, Italy.
authors.forename: Vittorio
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Gallese
authors.affiliation: Research Unit on Psychology of the Art, Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Gabriella
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gilli
authors.affiliation: Research Unit on Theory of Mind, Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Antonella
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Marchetti
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000502:physiology / Q000523:psychology; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D004954:Esthetics / Q000523:psychology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010151:Paintings / Q000523:psychology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*