Viewing art is good for us, but new research may now tell us why — and that therapeutic uses may be better than previously ...

These paintings are both by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian but display strikingly different styles. The house on the left is ...

When we view art, the flow of visual information goes from the eye to a part of the brain known as the visual cortex. That's where the visual information is first processed.

Researchers at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute found that people’s brain activity varied more when viewing abstract art, as compared with representational art. This was especially true in the default ...

04/08/2025 April 8, 2025. Researchers studying people's brain activity when looking at abstract art have revealed why we interpret blobs of paint on canvas so differently.

This is because this area is more involved in the recognition of objects, showing that the brain processes representational and abstract art quite differently. To play this video you need to ...

A book that explains the way looking at art affects your brain. ... “What we think of as representational art is pretty abstract as it’s on a flat surface,” he went on to say.

First, participants viewed 70 abstract paintings and sketches and 80 representational (realistic) paintings and photographs and rated how much they liked each one.

Unlike abstract art, representational art depicts recognizable subjects from the real world, such as landscapes or figures. The work might be executed in a wide range of styles, ...