Looking at Art on Psychedelics - eye tracking with psilocybin reveals deeper focus on specific painting details

Psilocybin changes how people visually engage with art, shifting gaze behavior measured by eye tracking. Researchers brought eye-tracking equipment and had participants view 30 paintings while on dried mushroom psilocybin. Participants completed two sessions: a very low-dose “active” control and a higher experimental dose, both after prior experience and screening. When on the higher dose, people wandered less and instead locked in more intensely on focal details, such as faces, rather than distributing attention more broadly. The study challenged an expectation that serotonergic psychedelics would relax top-down expectations and produce chaotic visual roving. Despite stronger detail-focused fixation and some reported perceptual effects, the drugs did not make participants like the paintings more than in the low-dose baseline. The piece also notes the exploratory nature of the small sample (15 completing all steps) and frames the work as an early step toward understanding what psychedelics change about perception and attention.