This study compared the eye movement patterns of twenty-three children and adults while viewing five paintings at the Van Gogh Museum. The objectives of the study were two-fold. First, the study...Show moreThis study compared the eye movement patterns of twenty-three children and adults while viewing five paintings at the Van Gogh Museum. The objectives of the study were two-fold. First, the study determined the roles of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes during the aesthetic experience. Second, the development of these attentional processes was investigated by comparing adults and children. Bottom-up processes were measured by creating salience maps for every painting, whereas top-down processing was manipulated by letting the participants view the paintings in two phases. In the first phase, participants were allowed to freely view the paintings. Before the second phase, background information about each painting was provided to the participants. Eye-tracking technology was used to measure the participants' eye movements whilst they viewed the paintings. The salience analysis consisted of a linear mixed-effects model, which results showed that there was no significant difference between the two phases over the fixations. As earlier research suggested that the change from bottom-up to top-down processing happens within the first few fixations, this may suggest that the processes people rely on stay constant afterwards. A second model was constructed to investigate the effect of age on viewing processes, suggesting that over the entire aesthetic process, there was no effect of age on the processes used by the participants. Despite this, the results indicate that children are more influenced by bottom-up processes at the start of their viewing process, whilst adults switch from top-down to bottom-up processes near the end of their aesthetic experience. In between the first and last fixations, both adults and children seem to use top-down processes.Show less