The Impact of Fandom on Image Viewing

Fan studies scholars theorize that interpretations of fandom-related images are reinforced by different ways of “seeing” character interactions. Fans themselves recognize that their interpretations are self-reinforcing: once they begin to see characters in particular ways (e.g., interpreting characters as being in romantic relationships even when those relationships are not explicitly part of the narrative), they report being unable to understand how other viewers could interpret things differently. However, there has not yet been any empirical research assessing how fans actually look at character interactions. Our interdisciplinary study fills that gap, taking a novel approach by tracking the ocular movements of fans and non-fans as they look at images of characters from the television series Supernatural. We tracked participants’ eye movements non-invasively with an EyeLink1000+ while they viewed images of characters from the show. We hypothesized that fans would exhibit different patterns of gaze behavior than non-fans during the viewing of character interactions. Our results show that, relative to non-fans, fans exhibited longer fixation durations (gazing longer at each position on average before shifting their gaze to another location) and increased saccadic amplitudes (making larger eye movements while gaze was shifted). Thus, fans and non-fans actively view images in objectively different ways. We theorize that, through repeated exposure to images, fans learn to ‘read’ images in measurable ways that reinforce their interpretations and that drive specific gaze dynamics. Future work will directly compare the gaze differences for images from the show that fans consider either particularly meaningful or not meaningful and will assess how fan viewing behavior changes over time.