The Psychology of Visual Art Eye, Brain and Art

Preface

The opportunities for people to engage with visual art are greater now than they have ever been before. In recent years, increasing numbers of people choose to attend major international gallery exhibitions that celebrate visual art both past and present, often at significant cost in terms of time and money. Most houses, shops, restaurants and public buildings display some form of visual art on their walls. It seems that everyone has an opinion about visual art, perhaps a favourite artist, artistic genre or historical era. Where does this universal interest in art spring from? Why have certain visual forms preoccupied artists across generations? What visual qualities underlie our reactions to artworks? Such questions have traditionally been tackled from the perspective of the humanities, especially disciplines such as art history and philosophy.

Psychology is the scientific study of people, the mind and human behaviour. The creation and consumption of visual art is an ancient and universal human activity and, as such, it should also be a prime focus of research in psychology. As a discipline, psychology dates from the mid-nineteenth century, when a small group of European scientists devised new experimental methods for measuring simple human behavioural responses. Over the last 150 years, psychologists have adopted concepts and techniques from a very wide range of scientific disciplines in their quest to understand the human mind and behaviour. Advances in neuroscience have had a crucial impact on psychological theories, providing researchers with fundamental information about the structure and function of the human brain. Mathematics and computer science have supplied deep theoretical principles that help us to understand the information available in visual images and the constraints within which any physical system must operate when trying to make sense of visual information.