From Cognitive Daily an article about how we see the world. They report on a study that tracked the eye movement of two groups, artists and psychologists, as they looked at photographs. The psychologists tended to look only at the object that was the focus of the picture while the artists tended to look at the picture as a whole.

The conclusion:

So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.

A good article followed by interesting discussion in the comment section.

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