Beauty in the (Mind’s) Eye of the Beholder: Thinking of Others’ Minds Shapes Aesthetic Judgements and Gaze Behaviour

Visual art appreciation often involves inferring the mental states of others, whether the artist’s intentions or the emotions of depicted characters. This ability, known as mentalizing, is central to social cognition in shaping interactions and predicting behaviours. However, little is known about the ways in which mentalizing affects aesthetic judgments and gaze behaviour. This question is essential for understanding how mentalizing shapes where we focus our gaze, what we value, and how we feel about different art forms. Given this limited knowledge, the current pre-registered study investigated whether adopting another’s perspective impacts aesthetic judgments and gaze behaviour when viewing Impressionist paintings. Eye movements of 52 participants were recorded while they evaluated paintings on liking, understanding, and emotional evocativeness from self- vs. other-perspective. Multi-level Bayesian regression modelling revealed that adopting other-perspective (i.e., the general public) rather than self-perspective enhanced aesthetic judgments, especially for liking and emotional evocativeness. This effect was more pronounced for landscapes than for artworks portraying people. The eye-tracking results showed that dwell time and fixation count remained similar across both self- versus other-perspectives. However, artworks depicting people attracted a greater number of fixations than landscapes, highlighting the social salience of human figures in visual art. Overall, our findings emphasise that adopting another’s perspective shapes how we feel and evaluate visual art, without changing overall gaze behaviour. Our study provides novel insights into the interplay between social cognition and visual aesthetics, with broader implications for how imagining the collective public’s perspective guides our experience with art.