Team profile by Maurizio Forte, Len White, Augustus Wendell, Alex Pieroni, Alyssa Ho, Srinjoyi Lahiri, Kathleen Seithel and Sidney Jordan

This project aims to explore the mental reconstructions and embodied aesthetic experiences engendered by real and virtual interactions with archaeological ruins and virtual representations of places, spaces and cultural artifacts associated with ancient cities. The main case studies included: the mausoleum of Cecilia Metella (Appia Antica Park in Rome), the Pyramid of Caius Cestius (Rome) and the archaeological site of Vulci (Viterbo) in Italy.

In summer 2023 the research team went to Italy to record eye-tracking and visual thinking strategies experiments for studying human behavior and visual perception in front of monuments and archaeological sites. These unique, multidimensional datasets and virtual representations will be used to engender embodied aesthetic experiences in both research subjects new to the material and expert scholars familiar with the site and Etruscan/Roman culture.

The neuroscience side of the team focused on tracking the eye movements of naive and more informed observers experiencing Vulci, an Etruscan archaeological site in Italy. Observers freely viewed the site using an elegant eye-tracking device (Pupil Invisible) that recorded the scene being viewed and the specific movements of the eyes and head of the observers.

In order to analyze the resulting streams of video and eye movement data, protocols were developed and adapted for use in this “real world” application. Those protocols involved proprietary utilities that allowed for the creation of “heatmaps” showing preferential patterns of visual fixation, which could be taken as biometric indicators of visual interest and attention.

Analysis protocols were also developed by a Data+ team that worked at Duke in the summer of 2023 on prototypes for eye movement analyses, “tagging” features of interest in the analyses, as well as correcting for changes in the visual scene as observers freely changed their head positions.

The results of these analyses shed insight into how observers with or without a background in archeology engaged with the site, as revealed in the images below (left, observers without an archaeological background; right, observers with an archaeological background).

Moreover, observers tended to spend more time fixating on different “tagged” features of the site, again depending on the background in archeology.

Note that the central foreground field (dark red tagged region in left image) was fixated more by observers with no archaeological background, while the constructed wall toward the right side of the field (dark red tagged region in right image) was fixated more by observers with some background in archeology.

In partnership with the virtual reality (VR) side of the team, the neuroscience-focused students also worked on creating an IRB-approved protocol for extending the analysis of visual cognition to the virtual experience of Vulci in the Dig@Lab at Duke. The protocol will enable experimental studies aiming to measure electroencephalographic (EEG) activities while observers engage with a virtual presentation of the Vulci site.

The simultaneous tracking of EEG activities and eye movements in VR will lay the foundation for future studies that more comprehensively evaluate the embodied aesthetic experience of encountering ruinscapes and other archaeologically meaningful objects, places and spaces.