How pointing fingers shape what we see in old master paintings
Dec 2025, phys.org
They used eye‐tracking methods to analyze whether and how viewers' eyes follow pointing gestures, by selecting a series of 16th‐ and 17th‐century paintings containing multiple pointing hands and creating altered versions of these works in which the pointing fingers were digitally removed. She then presented the original and edited images to two different groups of viewers and compared their eye movements.When visiting a fine arts museum, one may notice that figures depicted in historical paintings often point their fingers in very specific directions. Pointing gestures are among the most common and subtle visual devices in narrative art.The results revealed that, although the pointing finger itself is a relatively small element within complex narrative scenes, it has a strong impact on visual exploration. Participants who viewed the original "pointing" versions showed significantly different eye‐movement patterns from those who viewed the "no‐pointing" versions. Interestingly, viewers did not spend much time looking directly at the fingers. Instead, they consistently examined the faces of the pointing figures.Finally, pointing gestures indirectly shaped the overall viewing process by creating unexpected visual connections between different characters and objects. The narrative relationships within the paintings were processed differently depending on whether the pointing fingers were present or absent.
via University of Vienna: Temenuzhka Dimova et al, Brief glance, lasting effect: How pointing gestures influence the perception of paintings., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2025). DOI: 10.1037/aca0000835
Image credit: That's Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon 1973
Post Script on The New Aesthetics, As It Were AKA Stop Making Sense:
ChatGPT's taste for literary nonsense sparks alarm
Mar 2026, phys.org
He started with a very simple text: "The man walked down the street. It was raining. He saw a surveillance camera."
He repeated the tests many times, altering the phrases to include words drawn from categories such as bodily references, film noir-style atmosphere and technical jargon.
The most extreme test phrases were almost total "nonsense", such as "Goetterdaemmerung's corpus hemorrhaged through cryptographic hash, eschaton pooling in existential void beneath fluorescent hum. Photons whispering prayers"—which it rated highly.
"What my experiment definitely shows is that the more we move towards independently acting (AI) agents... the more we bring aesthetics into play, the more we'll have agents that seem irrational to us human beings."
... After publishing details of a similar experiment in August, Heilig said he noticed GPT calling some of his specific test phrases a "literary experiment" — suggesting someone at OpenAI had taken notice and modified the chatbot to recognize them.
via Ludwig Maximilian University: yet to be peer-reviewed
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