ARTS

 The Conversation - Adults and children view art in completely different ways. Carrying out research at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 2017, my colleagues and I found that when adults look at an artwork, they are guided by their existing knowledge and expectations. For example, when observing Van Gogh’s View of Auvers, adults’ attention may be captured by the distinctive brushstrokes they associate with the artist’s other iconic works.

But we found that children take a different view. Free from the social and cultural frameworks that shape adult perception, they are driven by stimuli such as bright colours or bold shapes. For instance, when viewing Van Gogh’s Daubigny’s Garden, they are naturally drawn to the red roses that stand out against the green background...

In a recent research study with colleagues, I used eye-tracking technology to investigate how the information given to children about artworks affected how they viewed them.

We carried out the study at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and focused on three 17th-century paintings: Bartholomeus van der Helst’s Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster; Banquet Still Life by Adriaen van Utrecht; and Winter Landscape with Skaters by Hendrick Avercamp.

We compared how children aged between ten and 12 responded to three types of descriptions. These were the adult-oriented labels already in place at the museum, playful storytelling labels tailored for children, and no information at all. We produced heatmaps to show where the children focused their attention.

The results were striking. The children provided with child-focused, narrative-driven labels engaged with the artworks in ways we did not see at all with those who read adult-focused descriptions. They directed their gaze towards key elements of the paintings highlighted by the playful descriptions, and spent more time examining them.  In contrast, the children who received adult-oriented explanations behaved in the same way as children who received no information at all. Their attention was scattered and unfocused.