Artistic Production Following Brain Damage: A Study of Three Artists

Chatterjee, Anjan; Bromberger, Bianca; Smith, William B.; Sternschein, Rebecca; Widick, Page

doi:10.1162/leon_a_00240

Cited by 22 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Since this is the first study of its kind, we did not wish to confound our results with concomitant language comprehension deficits that follow from left brain damage. However, we have shown that art production can be profoundly affected by left brain damage (Smith et al, 2011). Given that production and perception must overlap at some representational levels, we would predict that left brain damage would also affect art perception.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…We have shown previously that art production can be approached quantitatively (Smith et al, 2011). Now, we extend this approach to art perception.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the AAA (Smith et al, 2011), we reported that in patients with left or right focal brain damage, art becomes more abstract, distorted, and less realistic. The paintings are also produced with looser strokes, less depth, and more vibrant colors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Right Hemisphere in Esthetic Perception

Bromberger¹,

Sternschein²,

Widick³

et al. 2011

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Little about the neuropsychology of art perception and evaluation is known. Most neuropsychological approaches to art have focused on art production and have been anecdotal and qualitative. The field is in desperate need of quantitative methods if it is to advance. Here, we combine a quantitative approach to the assessment of art with modern voxel-lesion-symptom-mapping methods to determine brain–behavior relationships in art perception. We hypothesized that perception of different attributes of art are likely to be disrupted by damage to different regions of the brain. Twenty participants with right hemisphere damage were given the Assessment of Art Attributes, which is designed to quantify judgments of descriptive attributes of visual art. Each participant rated 24 paintings on 6 conceptual attributes (depictive accuracy, abstractness, emotion, symbolism, realism, and animacy) and 6 perceptual attributes (depth, color temperature, color saturation, balance, stroke, and simplicity) and their interest in and preference for these paintings. Deviation scores were obtained for each brain-damaged participant for each attribute based on correlations with group average ratings from 30 age-matched healthy participants. Right hemisphere damage affected participants’ judgments of abstractness, accuracy, and stroke quality. Damage to areas within different parts of the frontal parietal and lateral temporal cortices produced deviation in judgments in four of six conceptual attributes (abstractness, symbolism, realism, and animacy). Of the formal attributes, only depth was affected by inferior prefrontal damage. No areas of brain damage were associated with deviations in interestingness or preference judgments. The perception of conceptual and formal attributes in artwork may in part dissociate from each other and from evaluative judgments. More generally, this approach demonstrates the feasibility of quantitative approaches to the neuropsychology of art.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…We have shown previously that art production can be approached quantitatively (Smith et al, 2011). Now, we extend this approach to art perception.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Right Hemisphere in Esthetic Perception

Bromberger¹,

Sternschein²,

Widick³

et al. 2011

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

Self Cite

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“…If this view is correct, then damage to the right hemisphere should profoundly impair artistic production, whereas damage to the left hemisphere should largely spare such abilities. To test this hypothesis, the Assessment of Art Attributes (AAA) was used to assess changes in the artwork of three patients with lateralized brain damage: the Californian artist Katherine Sherwood and the Bulgarian painter Zlatio Boiyadjiev, both of whom had left brain damage, and Lovis Corinth, an important German artist who had right brain damage . The AAA is an instrument designed to assess works of art along six formal–perceptual and six conceptual–representational attributes.…”

Section: Art Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroscience of aesthetics

Chatterjee

Vartanian

2016

Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci.

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210

183

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Aesthetic evaluations are appraisals that influence choices in important domains of human activity, including mate selection, consumer behavior, art appreciation, and possibly even moral judgment. The nascent field of neuroaesthetics is advancing our understanding of the role of aesthetic evaluations by examining their biological bases. Here, we conduct a selective review of the literature on neuroaesthetics to demonstrate that aesthetic experiences likely emerge from the interaction between emotion-valuation, sensory-motor, and meaning-knowledge neural systems. This tripartite model can in turn be evoked to explain phenomena central to aesthetics, such as context effects on preferences. Indeed, context-dependent appraisals that focus on objects rather than on outcomes could be an important factor distinguishing aesthetic experiences from other kinds of evaluations.

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“…One might expect that sensitivity to different attributes within a work of art would be affected by different kinds of brain damage. Recently, we used the AAA to examine the effects of brain damage on art perception (Bromberger et al 2011). Our investigation focused on the role of the right hemisphere.…”

Section: Art Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%