Search

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.

© 2019 American Psychological Association. A growing body of correlational research has revealed systematic relationships between various aspects of visuospatial processing and representational drawing ability. However, very few studies have sought to examine the longitudinal development of the relation between drawing and visuospatial ability. The current investigation explored change in drawing and visuospatial skill in art students taking a foundational drawing course (N = 42) in a longitudinal design. Measures of representational drawing skill, dispositional traits, and visuospatial skill were taken at three time points over the course of 5 months. The findings reveal improvements in representational drawing, mental rotation, disembedding figures, and attentional switching. However, individual differences in change over time on one task did not predict change in another, revealing implications for domain-specific and domain-general aspects of art and design expertise. ispartof: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts vol:15 issue:1 pages:1-15 status: Published online

© 2018 American Psychological Association. 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 issueaccumulates, 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. ispartof: PSYCHOLOGY OF AESTHETICS CREATIVITY AND THE ARTS vol:13 issue:1 pages:58-73 status: published

A local processing bias in the block design task and in drawing strategy has been used to account for realistic drawing skill in individuals with autism. We investigated whether the same kind of local processing bias is seen in typically developing children with unusual skill in realistic graphic representation. Forty-three 5–11-year-olds who drew a still life completed a version of the block design task in both standard and segmented form, were tested for their memory for the block design items, and were given the Kaufmann Brief Intelligence Test-II. Children were classified as gifted, moderately gifted or typical on the basis of the level of realism in their drawings. Similar to autistic individuals, the gifted group showed a local processing bias in the block design task. But unlike autistic individuals, the gifted group showed a global advantage in the visual memory task and did not use a local drawing strategy; in addition, their graphic realism skill was related to verbal IQ. Differences in the extent of local processing bias in autistic and typically developing children with drawing talent are discussed.