Mobile eye tracking in the Royal Academy of Arts - Analysing scanpath sequences in Jackson Pollock's paintings

This study was set out to describe commonalities in gaze patterns during extended viewing time (4 mins) of abstract paintings in a museum setting. We recorded eye movements of 24 participants free viewing two Pollock paintings (‘Mural’ 1943, ‘Blue Poles’ 1952) in the Royal Academy. Unlike in a laboratory, experiments run in museums allow us to record extensive gaze displacements across large-scale canvases and use their amplitude to characterise viewing behaviour. Individual fixation sequences were converted into strings of letters corresponding to data bins and mapped to vector spaces. Strings were characterised by two features: alphabet size (A) corresponding to the number of data bins and repeating sub-sequences of sparsely occurring events (N). We trained SVM classifiers using combinations of A (2-26) and N (1-10). The highest accuracy (87.5%) was returned for A=8 and N=7, i.e. the two paintings were best distinguished using remarkably long 7-step eye movements sequences.