I wrote about an study earlier tonight on www.Webmetricsguru.com, my web analytics blog, that Artists see the Big Picture according to an Eyetracking Study.  There’s actual proof, in this study published by Cognitive Daily, that training in the Arts also trains the eyes to see (scan) differently than untrained eyes.

                                        Untrained                                 Trained Artist

The way I look at it – when you study Art, you learn that every part of the picture is important and that may end up translating into how the world is looked at and perceived – the EyeTracking Study sited at Cognitive Science appear to support that idea.

Here’s a little bit about how this EyeTracking Study was done:

“….Stine Vogt and Svein Magnussen showed 16 pictures including these two to trained artists and non-artists (psychologists) enrolled in Norway’s top graduate programs in their respective disciplines, using eye-tracking cameras and software to monitor where they looked. The viewers were unaware of the purpose of the test — they were told the study was about pupil size and response to pictures. In the first phase of the experiment, viewers simply looked at each picture in random order, and in the second phase, they were asked to view the pictures again, but to concentrate in order to remember them.”

First, the researchers defined what they considered to be the most important parts of the two pictures they showed people participating in this study; second, they had EyeTracking equipment to watch what people looked at while viewing the pictures.

To the non artist – there was less of a concept of what was actually important to look at – but Artists tended to look twice as much at parts of the picture that were designated important vs. those not considered important.