Non-art Students Research Articles

Artists have superior local and global processing abilities but show a preference for initially drawing globally.

The attentional demands of drawing require both local processing of an object’s details and global processing of its overall structure. In this study, we examined the extent to which artists have superior local and global processing skills, how these skills relate to artists’ ability to draw realistically and to autistic-related traits, and whether artists initially take a local or global approach to drawing. Forty first-year college art students and 41 nonart students completed two tasks assessing local processing and two tasks assessing global processing. Participants completed two drawing tasks that assessed their ability to draw realistically, two copying tasks that assessed whether they showed a preference for initially copying the local or global aspects of an object, and the Autism-Spectrum Quotient that assessed autistic-related traits. We found that art students outperformed nonart students on both the local and global processing tasks and that drawing ability was related to performance on these tasks. We also found that art students were more likely than nonart students to initially copy the global features in their drawings. Finally, we found that art students did not exhibit more autistic-related traits than nonart students and that the number of autistic-related traits was unrelated to performance on the local and global processing, drawing, or copying tasks. These results suggest that art students have an attentional flexibility that allows them to process information at a local and global level but that they have a preference for initially drawing globally.

Observational drawing in the brain: A longitudinal exploratory fMRI study

Observational drawing involves acquiring a number of basic drawing techniques and concepts. There is limited knowledge on how observational drawing skills are represented by brain responses. Here, we investigate the behavioral and functional changes behind students learning to draw in a longitudinal study on 45 participants by testing art students (n = 26) at the beginning and end of a 16-week observational drawing course compared to a matched group of non-art students (n = 19). Four novel tasks were used that involve making decisions about light sources, tonal value, line variation and linear perspective using task-based 7 T-functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). While exploratory in nature, we expected to find improvement on each task over time and functional changes in the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum for the art students. Art students’ performance significantly improved on the light sources, line variation, and linear perspective tasks and functional changes were found for the line variation, linear perspective, and tonal value tasks. Using whole brain analyses diffuse functional changes were discovered including prefrontal cortex areas and cerebellum. Brain areas involved in cognitive processing, including attention, decision making, motor control, top-down control, visual information processing, and working memory all functionally changed with experience. These findings demonstrate some of the first functional changes in the brain due to training in the arts and have implications for pedagogy and mental health.

Artists Excel on Image Activation But Not Image Manipulation Tasks

The ability to envision what is not directly seen is important in the visual arts, since artists do more than reproduce what they see. Such envisioning requires visual imagery abilities. In this study, we examined whether art students ( n = 32) have enhanced visual imagery abilities compared to nonart students ( n = 40). We administered four tasks designed to assess visual imagery. Three tasks assessed the ability to activate mental images: vividness of visual imagery, recognition of out-of-focus pictures, and abstraction; the fourth task assessed the ability to manipulate mental images: mental rotation. We also administered a verbal IQ and a creativity test to determine whether these measures should be included as covariates in our analyses. Results showed that art students excelled on two of the three image activation tasks, vividness of visual imagery and abstraction, but did not excel on the image manipulation task of mental rotation.

Artists as experts in visual cognition: An update.

The question of whether and how visual artists see the world differently than nonartists has long engaged researchers and scholars in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Yet as evidence regarding this issue accumulates, it has become clear that the answers to these questions are by no means straightforward. With a view to advancing ongoing debate in this field, the current study aimed to replicate and extend previous research by exploring the differences in visual-spatial ability between art students (n = 42) and nonart students (n = 37), using a comprehensive battery of visual-spatial and drawing tasks. Art students outperformed nonart students on drawing measures and some (but not all) visual-spatial tasks. This nuanced pattern of results broadly supports the notion that art students differ from nonart students in their ability to exert top-down control over attentional processing, but not in the phenomenology of low-level visual processing. Implications for theories of artistic expertise are discussed.

Mechanisms of Creativity Differences Between Art and Non-art Majors: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study.

Creativity is considered the ability to generate new ideas or behaviors, an ability that have diverse expressions in different human groups, such as painters and non-painters. Art major students require more creative activities than non-art students do. In this study, we plan to explore the figural creativity abilities of art major students and whether these students exhibited higher figural creativity scores and why their brain structure of gray matter are lower which may benefit from their professional training relative to non-art majors. Therefore, in this study, we use voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to identify different behavioral and brain mechanisms between art major students and non-art major students by using the figural Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. Our results showed that the TTCT-figural (TTCT-F) scores of art majors were higher than those of non-art majors. The TTCT-F score of art major students and practicing and study time have positive correlations which means art major’s figural creativity score benefit from there art professional training in some degree. Subsequently, the interaction analysis revealed that the TTCT-figural scores of art majors and non-majors exhibited significant correlations with the gray matter volumes (GMV) of the left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the left medial frontal gyrus (MFG). While the simple slope analysis showed that art majors, compared with non-art majors, exhibited a marginal significantly positive association with the left ACC and MFG, non-art majors exhibited a significantly negative association with the left ACC and MFG. Overall, our study revealed that people who major in artistic work are more likely to possess enhanced figural creative skills relative to non-artistic people. These results indicated that professional artistic programs or training may increase creativity skills via reorganized intercortical connections.

Substance Use and Psychological Disorders Among Art and Non-art University Students: an Empirical Self-Report Survey

Media stories often suggest that those working in the creative arts appear to use and abuse psychoactive substances. The aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between the use of psychoactive substances and the presence of psychological disorders among art and non-art students. Questionnaires related to these two areas were completed by 182 art students in higher education and a control group of 704 non-art university students. To assess psychoactive substance use, a structured questionnaire including the Cannabis Abuse Screening Test (CAST) and the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) was administered to participants. Psychological disorders were assessed using the Hungarian version of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and the Global Severity Index (GSI). After analyzing the data, significant differences were found between the two groups regarding their first use of psychoactive substances. Art students’ current substance use was found to be significantly more frequent compared to the control group. In relation to psychological disorders, art students scored significantly higher on three scales of the BSI (i.e., psychoticism, hostility, and phobic anxiety). Overall, a significantly higher proportion of artists were labeled as “problematic” using the GSI. The results suggest that artists have a higher risk of both substance use and experiencing psychological disorders.

Perceptual flexibility is coupled with reduced executive inhibition in students of the visual arts.

Artists often report that seeing familiar stimuli in novel and interesting ways plays a role in visual art creation. However, the attentional mechanisms which underpin this ability have yet to be fully investigated. More specifically, it is unclear whether the ability to reinterpret visual stimuli in novel and interesting ways is facilitated by endogenously generated switches of attention, and whether it is linked in turn to executive functions such as inhibition and response switching. To address this issue, the current study explored ambiguous figure reversal and executive function in a sample of undergraduate students studying arts and non-art subjects (N=141). Art students showed more frequent perceptual reversals in an ambiguous figure task, both when viewing the stimulus passively and when eliciting perceptual reversals voluntarily, but showed no difference from non-art students when asked to actively maintain specific percepts. In addition, art students were worse than non-art students at inhibiting distracting flankers in an executive inhibition task. The findings suggest that art students can elicit endogenous shifts of attention more easily than non-art students but that this faculty is not directly associated with enhanced executive function. It is proposed that the signature of artistic skill may be increased perceptual flexibility accompanied by reduced cognitive inhibition; however, future research will be necessary to determine which particular subskills in the visual arts are linked to aspects of perception and executive function.

Visual arts training is linked to flexible attention to local and global levels of visual stimuli

Observational drawing skill has been shown to be associated with the ability to focus on local visual details. It is unclear whether superior performance in local processing is indicative of the ability to attend to, and flexibly switch between, local and global levels of visual stimuli. It is also unknown whether these attentional enhancements remain specific to observational drawing skill or are a product of a wide range of artistic activities. The current study aimed to address these questions by testing if flexible visual processing predicts artistic group membership and observational drawing skill in a sample of first-year bachelor's degree art students (n=23) and non-art students (n=23). A pattern of local and global visual processing enhancements was found in relation to artistic group membership and drawing skill, with local processing ability found to be specifically related to individual differences in drawing skill. Enhanced global processing and more fluent switching between local and global levels of hierarchical stimuli predicted both drawing skill and artistic group membership, suggesting that these are beneficial attentional mechanisms for art-making in a range of domains. These findings support a top-down attentional model of artistic expertise and shed light on the domain specific and domain-general attentional enhancements induced by proficiency in the visual arts.

The artist emerges: Visual art learning alters neural structure and function

How does the brain mediate visual artistic creativity? Here we studied behavioral and neural changes in drawing and painting students compared to students who did not study art. We investigated three aspects of cognition vital to many visual artists: creative cognition, perception, and perception-to-action. We found that the art students became more creative via the reorganization of prefrontal white matter but did not find any significant changes in perceptual ability or related neural activity in the art students relative to the control group. Moreover, the art students improved in their ability to sketch human figures from observation, and multivariate patterns of cortical and cerebellar activity evoked by this drawing task became increasingly separable between art and non-art students. Our findings suggest that the emergence of visual artistic skills is supported by plasticity in neural pathways that enable creative cognition and mediate perceptuomotor integration.

Drawing on the right side of the brain: A voxel-based morphometry analysis of observational drawing

Structural brain differences in relation to expertise have been demonstrated in a number of domains including visual perception, spatial navigation, complex motor skills and musical ability. However no studies have assessed the structural differences associated with representational skills in visual art. As training artists are inclined to be a heterogeneous group in terms of their subject matter and chosen media, it was of interest to investigate whether there would be any consistent changes in neural structure in response to increasing representational drawing skill. In the current study a cohort of 44 graduate and post-graduate art students and non-art students completed drawing tasks. Scores on these tasks were then correlated with the regional grey and white matter volume in cortical and subcortical structures. An increase in grey matter density in the left anterior cerebellum and the right medial frontal gyrus was observed in relation to observational drawing ability, whereas artistic training (art students vs. non-art students) was correlated with increased grey matter density in the right precuneus. This suggests that observational drawing ability relates to changes in structures pertaining to fine motor control and procedural memory, and that artistic training in addition is associated with enhancement of structures pertaining to visual imagery. The findings corroborate the findings of small-scale fMRI studies and provide insights into the properties of the developing artistic brain.

Does Shape Constancy Relate to Drawing Ability? Two Failures to Replicate

People vary in their ability to make accurate representational drawings. Cohen and Jones (2008) have suggested that individuals who draw poorly have problems in the perception of objects, so that the extent of shape constancy (phenomenal regression) correlates with drawing ability, there being a “robust negative relation between perceptual errors resulting from shape constancy and drawing accuracy.” The present article describes two attempts to replicate that finding, with 30 non-art students in Study 1 and with 106 art students in Study 2. Study 1 found a correlation that was statistically significant, but in the opposite direction to that reported by Cohen and Jones, and in Study 2 the correlation was very close to zero. Combining these results with those of Cohen and Jones using a random-effects meta-analysis finds a non-significant correlation overall. Taken together, these findings throw doubt on the Cohen and Jones' hypothesis that those with less phenomenal regression have better representational drawing ability.

Seeing the Mind Behind the Art

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., “artist,” “child”) that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups’ judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists’ intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.

A Cross-cultural Study of the Development of Artistic Talent, Creativity and Giftedness

In this study, examining the relationships among age, culture, training in the fine arts, the technical and aesthetic properties of drawings, and realized artistic giftedness, the researchers intermixed the juvenile drawings executed by critically acclaimed artists with artworks executed by contemporary North American and Chinese North American children. When judges from the North American culture and from the Chinese North American culture, blind to this mix, assessed the drawings, assessments made by the representatives of both cultures were more alike than they were different. Only the North American judges' assessments, however, suggest that the art students' life drawings were more technically and aesthetically successful, and more creative, on the average, than the non-art students' drawings. These judges also gave the juvenilia the highest scores in technical skill and the lowest scores in creativity independent of technical skill and aesthetic success. Conclusions and implications stress the role of technical skill in the development of artistic potential.

Perspective, Memory, and Narrative

Basic perspective is one of the fundamental skills that a student acquires in a foundation-level drawing class. In the drawing and composition class I teach, I have attempted to interject personal narrative into the technical mastery of perspective. This lesson, which begins with the recollection of a dramatic, even traumatic, childhood memory, incorporates perspective as a tool to realize the image. My class includes a mixture of art and nonart students. The art students need solid training, while the nonart ones should leave with an understanding of how images create meaning.

Comparison of Barron-Welsh Art Scores of Artists and Nonartists and between Dancers of Two Training Styles

The Barron-Welsh Revised Art Scale was administered to 144 female and 68 male university undergraduates in art, music, dance, and general studies to test whether experience and training in the arts would be associated with choices consistent with openness to perceptual experience. It was hypothesized that training in modern and jazz dance, which is stylistically less classical and formal, would be associated with greater sensitivity to experience than would training in ballet and flamenco, more formalized dance styles. No differences between art students and nonart students or among dancers with various training experiences were observed.

Effect of Differing Educational Background on Appraisal of Posture in Dance

This study investigated the effect of differing educational backgrounds on the appraisal of dance postures. In an earlier study (Van Wieringen, el al., 1982) 20 still photographs of postures displayed by a female dancer were judged by 42 nonart university students on a semantic differential of 20 bipolar 7-point rating scales. A principalcomponent analysis with VARIMAX rotation gave a three-factor structure, very similar to Osgood's well-known Activity, Evaluation, and Potency (Osgood, et al., 1957). The last factor, however, tended to fuse with Activity. In the present study the same 20 postures were rated by 45 subjects. These subjects were, on the basis of the hypothesis that differing educational backgrounds would give rise to differences in appraisal, divided into four subgroups, viz., nonart university students (n = 26), subjects with a nonart profession (n = 9), art-school students (n = 5), and students at an academy of dance (n = 5). On this occasion only four rating scales were used, uiz., 'passive-active', 'simple-complex', 'coarse-graceful', and 'unpleasantpleasant'. In the earlier study the first two scales loaded highest on the Activity factor, rhe latter two on the Evaluation factor. The scores on the first two scales were combined (by averaging) for an Aaivity score and scores on the last two scales for an Evaluation score. For each posture both the Activity and Evaluation scores were averaged over subjects in each subgroup. The resulting mean Activity scores and Evaluation scores assigned to postures by nonart students showed significant Spearman rank correlations (7.) with the factor scores of these postures on respectively the Activity and Evaluation dimension in the earlier study (r. = .94, P < .O1 and 7. = .75, p < .01, respectively). This indicates that the four scales represented these two dimensions fairlv well. Correlations between the mean Activity scores assigned to the postures by the four different subgroups were all significant; r. varied from .8G to .97. With regard to the mean Evaluation scores, only those assigned by the nonart student and nonart professional groups (fa = .91, # < .01) and those assigned by the art school and dance academy groups (r. = .GO, p < .01) showed significant correlations, while neither of the other between-group correlations were significant at the 5% level; r. varied from .20 to .44. These results suggest that, in judging postures in dance, activity judgements are not influenced by educational background, while aesthetic appraisal ('Evaluation') does show such an influence. With regard to the latter appraisal nonart students seem to agree with nonart professionals and art smdents with students in dance, while no such agreement seems to exist between the nonart subgroups and the art and dance subgroups. Further research on such educational background differences is planned; the postures to be judged, however, being replaced by video-taped dance-phrases.

Ethnic Aesthetics: Blacks' and Nonblacks' Aesthetic Perception of Paintings by Blacks

In this study of Blacks' and Nonblacks' perceptions of Black art, non-art students, 92 Blacks and 78 Nonblacks, from four southern colleges responded on 20 bipolar seven-point adjective scales to 9 slides, 3 each of Mainstream, Blackstream, and Activist paintings by Blacks, representing canons of Black Aesthetics. Analysis of the data indicated that Blacks rate Blackstream and Activist images more highly than Nonblacks, but the difference is of degree and not of kind. A Black Aesthetic is supported in that Blacks respond to imagery with direct reference to the Black experience; however, similar structural patterns underlie Blacks' and Nonblacks' aesthetic perception of Black Art. Art created by Black artists, as by other ethnic groups, has functioned in contexts reflecting value orientations that range from near total dominance by their own group to near total absorption into the broader prevailing aesthetic. Recently the valuing of cultural diversity in contemporary society has produced a strong interest in the aesthetics of social and ethnic subgroups. Among these groups the question of whether or not a Black aesthetic exists has been the focus of much debate, as have the corollary questions of its derivation and essential canons. These discussions have resulted in positions ranging from those claiming the existence of a distinct Black aesthetic to those that place art

Individual differences in perceived similarity and preference for visual art: A multidimensional scaling analysis

Previous studies have shown that individuals may attend to different dimensions in making an overall judgment of similarity between complex stimuli. The present study investigated the nature of differences in the perceived similarity of reproductions of paintings by the use of multidimensional scaling techniques. Using the INDSCAL model, a group of art-trained students are shown to differ significantly from a group of nonart students in terms of their differential weighing of a set of common dimensions. The same subjects’ preferences are examined in relation to these differences by use of the PREFMAP hierarchy of models. While the simplest (vector) model was found to be appropriate for almost all subjects, large differences in vector direction and average subject ideal-point location are found. Implications for future studies of responses to art are discussed.