The eyes are "windows to the soul". They not only work as sensory organs, but also reflect subjective/internal states of the beholders, such as their interests, attentional foci, and emotional states. This project is devoted to elucidating eye-movement correlates of the aesthetic experience of readers.
We start the project with investigating the eye-tracking data patterns that correlate with the aesthetic perception/evaluation of short sentences. We then construct a model for describing the relations between eye-data and aesthetic perception/evaluation. The final goal of the project is to develop a decoding method of the eye-tracking data that has predictive power regarding the subjective aesthetic experience of readers (or at least parts of it). We aim to combine our eye-tracking findings with neuroscientific analyses, by performing the dual-recording of the eye-tracking and neuroimaging (fMRI, MEG, EEG) during reading behaviour. We expect that this should help refining our decoding algorithm.