Reconfirm gestalt principles from scan-path analysis on viewing photos

The advances in communication technology not only ushered in an era of visual image explosion, but also led to the emergence of the “visual generation” who are heavily image-reliant in their quotidian existence. Photography is a form of visual arts that sets great store by human visual perception. It brings aesthetic delight by connecting human vision with psychological experiences. Every captivating or heart-touching photograph has its sui generis context or story, and gestalt theory may be the key to this kind of mystery. However, people have simply a limited knowledge of their viewing mechanism, and compelling evidence for the links between viewers' inner feelings and visual cognition remains wanting. To remedy this deficiency, this study takes the angle of positive aesthetics and employs the eye-tracking method to investigate the influence of photographic compositions' gestalt on the subjects' visual cognition, so as to grasp how they look at, interpret and appreciate photographic works. By manipulating the gestalt elements, calculating the dispersion degree of the subjects' scan paths, and collecting the subjects' opinions on the aesthetic quality of each photographic work, we found that the works embodying the gestalt principles tend to confine the subjects' scan paths to a unified context, while those violating the principles do not. Enhancing the foundation of photography and developing a new eye-tracking method with positive aesthetics, this study will stimulate photographers' artistic creativity, promote arts education, improve students' aesthetic literacy, and produce useful teaching material on the pedagogy and theories of photography.