Artists as experts in visual cognition: An update.

Abstract

The question of whether and how visual artists see the world differently than non-artists 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 non-art students (n = 37), using a comprehensive battery of visual-spatial and drawing tasks. Art students outperformed non-art 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 non-art 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.

Learning to see by learning to draw: A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between representational drawing training and visuospatial skill.

“…In contrast, the art students in the current study already had amassed several years of artistic experience and had gained entry to a prestigious art and design school. As our prior study demonstrated (Chamberlain et al 2019), these students were already outperforming non-art students prior to starting their foundation course. Therefore, it is possible that the ATTA may not have been sensitive enough to measure changes in artistic creative output over time in an expert group.…”

“…A recent extension of this work is a more comprehensive study by Chamberlain et a. (2019), examining artists' and non-artists' performance on a wide range of perception and drawing tasks, and largely replicating this basic finding (see also Kozbelt & Seeley, 2007).…”

“…This suggests that the acquisition of drawing skill drives changes in perception, but it does not rule out the possibility that artist may have some initial perceptual advantages as well. Along these lines, Chamberlain et al (2019) found that art students, even at the very beginning of their college-level art and design education, outperformed college-level nonartists on several standard visuospatial tasks, including mental rotation, embedded figures, and bistable figure perception. In other low-level visual tasks, such as visual illusions and identifying degraded pictures, art students performed similarly to non-art students.…”

Artists Excel on Image Activation But Not Image Manipulation Tasks

“…Recognition of out-of-focus pictures. The Out-of-Focus Pictures Task, similar to that used by Kozbelt (2001) and recently used by Chamberlain et al (2019), assesses the ability to go beyond the information given to identify the object represented in the image. Because this task requires going beyond the information given, we suggest that this task requires filling in what one can see with visual imagery.…”

“…Raters coded the open-ended responses using a key of correct responses developed by Chamberlain et al (2019). Raters practiced coding using responses from the Chamberlain study, and once 80% agreement was achieved on the practice responses, they coded responses from this study.…”