A group of participants lay in an MRI scanner at Columbia University in New York and looked at paintings. When the images were representational, a face or a landscape or a bowl of fruit, the participants’ brains responded in roughly the same way. When the images became abstract, something else happened: activity diverged and became individual. The findings were published in the scientific journal PNAS in 2025, and they reveal something unexpected about why an abstract poster can mean completely different things to two people sharing the same living room.
The phenomenon has a name that is more than a century old. Art historians call it the beholder’s share, and the idea is simple to state but hard to prove: a work of art isn’t finished when the artist puts down the brush. It’s finished when someone looks at it and fills in the rest with their own memories, associations, and day. Now brain imaging supports the claim, and that changes how you should think about choosing art for your home.
Quick facts: The study “The Beholder's Share: Bridging art and neuroscience to study individual differences in subjective experience” was received by PNAS on August 14, 2024, and accepted on February 11, 2025. It was presented by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000, and the research was conducted at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.
Riegl’s discovery: the artwork that isn’t complete until someone looks at it
The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, who was active around the turn of the 20th century and died in 1905, studied 17th-century Dutch group portraits and noticed something no one had quite put into words. The figures in the paintings looked out of the canvas. They turned toward the viewer. Riegl called it the beholder’s participation and argued that Dutch painting deliberately left a gap that viewers had to step into for the composition to come together.
The idea was developed further by the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris and later by the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who gave it its best-known formulation in his 1960 book “Art and Illusion.” Gombrich linked it to a problem that vision scientists call the inverse optics problem: the retina receives a flat, incomplete, ambiguous signal, and the brain has to guess what it means. Seeing, then, is not receiving an image. It is constructing one. A painting consciously harnesses that process.
Eric Kandel brought the same line of reasoning into neuroscience through his books "The Age of Insight" and "Reductionism in Art and Brain Science," and he was the one who presented the new PNAS study. It builds a bridge between Riegl’s observation from 1902 and an MRI scanner in New York more than 120 years later.
What the Columbia Researchers Actually Saw When Participants Encountered Abstract Art
The design tested a prediction that until then had been pure theory. If abstract art really leaves more to the viewer, two people looking at the same abstract painting should have less similar brain responses than two people looking at the same figurative painting. And if that is true, where in the brain does the difference arise? In the visual cortex, where the image is first processed, or farther in, where memories and meaning are handled?
The answer was clear. The difference was not in the early visual areas. Optically, the participants saw the same thing. The difference arose in the higher associative areas, the networks that handle memory, self-reflection, and narratives. There, responses were person-specific in a way they were not when viewing figurative works. In other words, what varied between people was not the visual input but the interpretation.
"Two people looking at a figurative painting see the same thing. Two people looking at an abstract painting see the same surface but different meanings, and now that difference can be measured."
For someone buying art for their own home, this is more than a curiosity. It explains why recommendations for abstract art so often fall flat. A friend can praise a work without managing to convey the experience, because a significant part of it was never in the work, but in the friend.
The Default Mode Network: The Brain’s Daydreaming Mode and Its Role in Beauty
The areas that stood out in the study largely belong to what is known as the default mode network. It is the group of brain regions most active when we are not doing anything in particular: when our minds wander, when we remember, when we imagine the future, or try to understand what a story is really about. So the network is not primarily concerned with vision, but with our inner lives.
It is not new for this to show up in art research. Back in 2019, a research team published the study "The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains" in PNAS, showing that the same network tracks aesthetic judgments whether the subject is a building, a landscape, or a work of art. The network seems to encode something like "this moves me" rather than "this looks a certain way."
The interesting part is how the two findings fit together. An ambiguous work engages the inner system more. The inner system is what creates personal relevance. So ambiguous works feel more personal. It's a coherent chain of explanation, and it applies just as much to a printed poster on the wall of a rental apartment as to an oil painting in a museum. It's worth noting that the network does not measure quality in any objective sense. It registers emotional impact. So two people can have equally strong responses to two works that art history values very differently, and both are right about their own experience.
Psychological distance: why the abstract feels bigger than its subject
A related 2020 study in PNAS used a theory psychologists call construal level theory. In short: the farther away something feels in time, space, or likelihood, the more abstractly we think about it. Conversely, the more abstractly something is presented, the more distant and broad we perceive it to be. The researchers showed that viewers described abstract works in more general, principle-based terms than figurative works, which instead prompted concrete, detail-oriented descriptions.
This explains an experience many people have had without being able to put it into words. A detailed nature image of a pine forest is described as "a forest backlit by the sun." A large color-field painting is described as "calm" or "grief" or "a breath." The subject shrinks and the meaning grows. In practice, choosing an abstract painting means choosing an emotional direction rather than an object.
Tip: Try a piece using the silence method before you buy it. Look at it for thirty seconds without reading the title, then write down the first word that comes to mind. Do it again a day later. If the word is the same, the piece has a stable meaning for you and can hang somewhere you pass every day. If the word changes drastically, the piece is probably more demanding than you think.
What the viewer's share means when choosing art for your own wall
The first practical takeaway is about who should choose. If abstract works activate personal associations to a greater extent than figurative ones, then abstract art is a less reliable gift choice for someone you don't know well. It is, however, an excellent choice for yourself, or for someone whose inner world you truly know. Figurative subjects, such as photographic art or botanical studies, reach more people in roughly the same way and are therefore safer choices to make together.
The second conclusion concerns placement. Works that engage the internal network reward repeated, undisturbed viewing. An abstract composition is therefore more effective in the bedroom, reading nook, or on the wall opposite an armchair than in a passageway where no one stops. A figurative image that’s easy to read is better suited to the hall and staircase, where viewing happens in passing. So our selection of abstract posters belongs in rooms where people sit still.
The third conclusion concerns the degree of ambiguity. Completely random fields of color give the brain too little to latch onto, while overly detailed subjects leave no room at all. What works in practice lies somewhere in between: compositions with a clear structure but open meaning. That’s exactly the balance that makes minimalist posters and clean-lined graphic posters so enduring. We’ve written more about this mechanism in our overview of processing fluency and why some art feels beautiful.
Finally, the viewer’s contribution changes over time. A work you didn’t understand when you moved in could become the one you’re most attached to three years later, because your contribution to it has been filled in with new memories. This effect is described in more detail in our article about the mere exposure effect and the art you learn to love. It’s also an argument for not replacing a painting after just three weeks simply because it feels challenging.
Frequently asked questions about abstract art and the viewer’s contribution
Riegl didn’t have an MRI scanner. He had Dutch group portraits, a sharp eye, and a suspicion that the picture and the viewer do the work together. Just over 120 years later, that suspicion has been measured. What makes this useful to you is the conclusion: the most important quality of the art on your wall isn’t how elaborate it is, but how much of yourself it lets you put into it. Explore our abstract designs and works by famous artists, and feel free to read our guide to abstract posters before deciding. You can read the full studies in PNAS and a summary from Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.