An Eye Tracking Study on Symmetry and Golden Ratio in Abstract Art

A visual stimulus that is divided in harmonic proportions is often judged as more pleasant than others. This is well known by artists that often used two main types of geometric harmonic patterns: symmetry and the golden ratio. Symmetry refers to the property of an object to have two similar halves, whereas the golden ratio consists of dividing an object in a major and a minor part so that their proportion is the same as that between the whole object and its major part. Here we investigated looking behaviour and explicit preferences for different regularities including symmetry and golden ratio. We selected four Mark Rothko’s paintings, a famous abstract expressionism artist, characterized by two main areas depicted by different colours: one symmetric (ratio between areas: 50–50%), one in golden ratio (38–62%), one in an intermediate ratio (46–54%), and one in a ratio exceeding the golden ratio (32–68%). Thirty-six healthy participants (24.75 ± 3.71 years old) completed three tasks: observation task (OT), pleasantness task (PT), and harmony task (HT). Findings for explicit ratings of pleasantness and harmony were very similar and were not significantly correlated with patterns of looking behaviour. Eye Dwell Time mainly depended on stimuli orientation (p < 0.001), but for the harmony task also by ratio and their interaction. Our results showed that the visual scanning behaviour of abstract arts primarily depends on the orientation of internal components, whereas their proportion is more important for the pleasantness and harmony explicit judgments.