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

Abstract

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.

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

“…These tasks were selected to represent a range of levels of visual processing (top-down and bottom-up) and have been validated and investigated in relation to artistic skill in previous research (Chamberlain, Heeren, Swinnen, & Wagemans, 2018;Chamberlain et al, 2013;Chamberlain & Wagemans, 2015;Kozbelt, 2001). As mentioned previously, those tasks which emphasize top-down effects on visual perception, are most reliably found to be correlated with drawing skill, while tasks representing bottom-up mechanisms usually produce null effects.…”

Drawing as a Window Onto Expertise

“…In support of this intuition, evidence suggests that artists can successfully integrate parts of an object into a meaningful whole using less information than novices (Perdreau & Cavanagh, 2013) and are better at selecting the most salient aspects of an image for rendering a convincing global representation (Kozbelt, Seidel, ElBassiouny, Mark, & Owen, 2010). It can be argued that superior performance on representational drawing tasks is more likely to reflect attentional flexibility than a failure of selective attention to parts or wholes (Chamberlain, Heeren, Swinnen, & Wagemans, 2018; Chamberlain & Wagemans, 2015). To return to the example of portraiture, presenting a face upside down disrupts the ability to draw long-range spatial relationships between facial features (holistic processing) but has no impact on the processing of the features themselves (Ostrofsky, Kozbelt, Cohen, Conklin, & Thomson, 2016), suggesting that accuracy in drawing faces is dependent on both holistic and featural processing (for a full treatment of perceptual expertise effects in representational drawing, see Chamberlain & Wagemans, 2016).…”

Divergent Thinking Influences the Perception of Ambiguous Visual Illusions

“…Whilst openness/intellect and creativity are highly correlated (and often used interchangeably), only a handful of studies have investigated the link between measures of creativity, cognitive flexibility, and perceptual switching (B. O. Bergum & Bergum, 1979; J. E. Bergum & Bergum, 1979; Best et al., 2015; Chamberlain et al., 2018; W. Li et al., 2015). Klintman (1984) first reported a relationship between performance on the alternate use task (AUT) and perceptual switching rates for the static Necker Cube.…”

“…(2015). More recently, Chamberlain et al. (2018) investigated the relationship between perceptual flexibility and artistic skill.…”