The beholder’s share: Cross-subject variability in responses to abstract art

Subjective experience of art emerges from an interaction between external input, which is shared across individuals, and internal associations, which vary across individuals and give art its personal meaning. In art theory, the Beholder’s Share refers to the contribution a viewer makes to the meaning of a painting by drawing on a set of unique prior experiences. A key tenet of the Beholder’s Share is that a viewer brings more personal meaning to abstract art than to representational art. Here, we interrogate this theory. We reason that more personal meaning brought to a painting should manifest in variability across subjects in neural responses to the same painting. To test this, we scanned participants with fMRI while they viewed abstract or representational paintings. To determine whether subjects respond more subjectively to abstract vs. representational paintings, we measured cross-subject variability in patterns of BOLD activity. We found that abstract paintings elicited more variable patterns of BOLD activity, specifically in regions of the Default Mode Network, but not in low-level visual regions. This pattern is consistent with the idea that abstract paintings evoke more subjective high-level responses despite common visual input. Next, we leveraged neural networks to model how differences in individuals' prior visual experiences could drive the variability in high-level responses to abstract art. We simulated individual differences in visual experience using instances of the same neural network (ResNet50) trained on different visual data sets and compared across-network variability in activations for abstract and representational paintings. We found that representations varied across networks more for abstract paintings than for representational paintings. Complementing the fMRI results, this pattern was found specifically in higher layers of the network. Overall, these studies provide insight into a possible neural instantiation of the Beholder’s Share and how it may emerge from individual differences in prior experience.