When the gaze turns away: How body orientation impacts aesthetic judgments and gaze behaviour

Front-view figures in visual art play an essential role in shaping social perception and aesthetic experience by directly engaging the viewer through eye contact, facial expression, and bodily cues. In contrast, back-view figures, known as Rückenfigur, have been proposed to facilitate a more immersive mode of aesthetic engagement. By obscuring facial and bodily features, the Rückenfigur invites the viewer to imaginatively adopt the figure's viewpoint as a means of understanding and appreciating the depicted scene. Yet empirical evidence supporting these claims remains limited. To address this knowledge gap, the current pre-registered study used eye-tracking and Bayesian regression modelling to investigate the extent to which front- versus back-view figures impact aesthetic experience and gaze behaviour. Fifty-three participants viewed artworks featuring both figure types and evaluated them on aesthetic liking, perceived understanding, and emotional evocativeness while their eye movements were recorded. Across all measures, back-view figures enhanced aesthetic evaluations, especially for liking and emotional evocativeness, compared to front-view figures, suggesting that Rückenfigur-type of representations enhance viewers’ aesthetic experience. Gaze behaviour results demonstrated that both figure types captured attention at comparable levels, as reflected in similar dwell times. However, back-view figures prompted a greater number of fixations, suggesting that back-view orientations involve more frequent gaze shifts and possibly increased visual exploration relative to front-view figures. Taken together, these findings provide novel evidence for the aesthetic and attentional mechanisms underlying human figure perception in visual art, demonstrating that body orientation critically shapes viewers' aesthetic experience.