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3d printing is capable of providing dose individualization for pediatric medicines and translating the precision medicine approach into practical application. In pediatrics, dose individualization and preparation of small dosage forms is a requirement for successful therapy, which is frequently not possible due to the lack of suitable dosage forms. For precision medicine, individual characteristics of patients are considered for the selection of the best possible API in the most suitable dose with the most effective release profile to improve therapeutic outcome. 3d printing is inherently suitable for manufacturing of individualized medicines with varying dosages, sizes, release profiles and drug combinations in small batch sizes, which cannot be manufactured with traditional technologies. However, understanding of critical quality attributes and process parameters still needs to be significantly improved for this new technology. To ensure health and safety of patients, cleaning and process validation needs to be established. Additionally, adequate analytical methods for the in-process control of intermediates, regarding their printability as well as control of the final 3d printed tablets considering any risk of this new technology will be required. The PolyPrint consortium is actively working on developing novel polymers for fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3d printing, filament formulation and manufacturing development as well as optimization of the printing process, and the design of a GMP-capable FDM 3d printer. In this manuscript, the consortium shares its views on quality aspects and measures for 3d printing from drug-loaded filaments, including formulation development, the printing process, and the printed dosage forms. Additionally, engineering approaches for quality assurance during the printing process and for the final dosage form will be presented together with considerations for a GMP-capable printer design.

A dominant theory of embodied aesthetic experience (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 197) posits that the appreciation of visual art is linked to the artist's movements when creating the artwork, yet a direct link between the kinematics of drawing actions and the aesthetics of drawing outcomes has not been experimentally demonstrated. Across four experiments, we measured aesthetic responses of students from arts and non-arts backgrounds to drawing movements generated from computational models of human writing. Experiment 1 demonstrated that human-like drawing movements with bell-shaped velocity profiles (Sigma Lognormal [SL] and Minimum Jerk [MJ]) are perceived as more natural and pleasant than movements with a uniform profile, and in both Experiments 1 and 2 movements that were perceived as more natural were also preferred. Experiment 3 showed that this effect persists if lower-level dynamic stimulus features are fully matched across experimental and control conditions. Furthermore, aesthetic preference for human-like movements were associated with greater perceptual fluency in Experiment 3, evidenced by unbiased estimations of the duration of natural movements. In Experiment 4, line drawings with visual features consistent with the dynamics of natural, human-like movements were preferred, but only by art students. Our findings directly link the aesthetics of human action to the visual aesthetics of drawings, but highlight the importance of incorporating artistic expertise into embodied accounts of aesthetic experience.

Previous research has shown that artists employ flexible attentional strategies during offline perceptual tasks. The current study explored visual processing online, by tracking the eye movements of artists and non-artists (n=65) while they produced representational drawings of photographic stimuli. The findings revealed that it is possible to differentiate artists from non-artists on the basis of the relative amount of global-to-local saccadic eye movements they make when looking at the target stimulus while drawing, but not in a preparatory free viewing phase. Results indicated that these differences in eye movements are not specifically related to representational drawing ability, and may be a feature of artistic ability more broadly. This eye movement analysis technique may be used in future research to characterise the dynamics of attentional shifts in eye movements while artists are carrying out a range of artistic tasks.

Slow looking is an increasingly prevalent strategy for enhancing visitor engagement in the gallery, yet there is little research to show why looking at artworks for longer should be beneficial. The curator of a recent exhibition of Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Gallery in London encouraged viewers to look slowly in order to enrich their experience of Bonnard’s paintings. This article explores some of the reasons why Bonnard’s work, in particular, rewards the viewer who spends more time studying it. The authors draw on various scientific studies of the ways in which observers process color contrasts, spatial configuration and figure-ground segregation in artworks and in everyday vision. They propose that prolonged interactions with works of art can facilitate perceptual learning, and they suggest ways in which these effects could be empirically studied using psychological methods.

Graffiti art is a controversial art form, and as such there has been little empirical work assessing its aesthetic value. A recent study examined image statistical properties of text-based artwork and revealed that images of text contain less global structure relative to fine detail compared to artworks. However, previous research did not include graffiti tags or murals, which reside in the space between text and visual art. The current study investigated the image statistical properties and attractiveness of graffiti relative to other text-based and pictorial art forms, focusing additionally on the role of expertise. A series of images (N = 140; graffiti, text and paintings) were presented to a group of observers with varying degrees of art interest and expertise ( N = 169). Findings revealed that image statistics predicted attractiveness ratings to images, and that biases against graffiti art are less salient in an expert sample.

During lyophilisation of highly potent Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) potential contamination of the freeze-drier is an important safety issue. Since the stoppers are in semistoppered position during the lyophilization process, API may contaminate the chamber and cross-contamination may occur as well. In this study two protective bags, which enclose each tray and their influence on heat and mass transfer during freeze-drying were investigated. Sublimation tests were performed using either purified water or solutions containing trehalose as well as hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HPbCD) as bulking agents. During sublimation tests with purified water both bags clearly influenced heat and mass transfer compared to unpacked reference vials. The bag, which was originally designed to be used for steam sterilization, had a massive impact on drying characteristics. The bag membrane becomes the rate limiting factor, generating a separate compartment within the bag. In this compartment vapor pressure is much higher compared to the chamber pressure during primary drying, leading to altered drying conditions. However, drying was still possible. The other bag, which was specifically designed for lyophilization, also had an impact on drying behavior which could be assigned to the foil between shelf and bottom of the vials. This was detectable as differences in Kv values. Membrane resistance, however, becomes negligible when 10% (w/w) trehalose or HPbCD solutions were dried using the later bag as containment. The data reported in this work demonstrate the relevance and value of sublimation tests to understand the lyophilization process, especially when new components are implemented. The data should be considered, when freeze-drying shall be performed using such bags.

Individual dosing of pharmaceutics and personalized medicine have become important with regard to therapeutic safety. Dose adjustments, biorelevant drug release and combination of multiple active substances in one dosage form for the reduction in polymedication are essential aspects that increase the safety and acceptance of the patient’s pharmacotherapy. Therefore, not only innovative drug products but also new analytical methods are needed during the drug development phase and for quality control that can simultaneously determine different active ingredients and cover wide concentration ranges. We investigated a liquid-core waveguide UV absorbance flow cell detector coupled to an existing HPLC-UV system. A Teflon AF 2400 capillary tubing of 20 cm length was connected in series to the HPLC flow line and enabled a lower limit of quantification of 1 ng/mL pramipexole (increase in sensitivity by 20 compared to common 0.9 cm flow cells). This allowed the low-concentration of pramipexole and the higher concentrations of levodopa and benserazide occurring during drug release to be determined in a single chromatographic run within 22.5 min.

In the past two decades, ‘slow looking’ has emerged as an engaging art-viewing approach used by museums around the world as part of their in-person and online programming, but there has been little empirical inquiry into the precise effects of the practice. This study represents the first such attempt, exploring reported impacts of slow looking within an online context. Specifically, the study examined the effects of two factors — audio context (control, meditation, historical) and image category (photography, representational, abstract) — on mood change and aesthetic engagement. A total of 141 participants completed the online exercise, first selecting a series of three artworks within one of the image categories and then viewing each for 3 min per work while listening to the randomly allocated audio context. Participants reported feeling significantly more pleasant and relaxed after the exercise. Representational artworks were chosen the most and also contributed to greater overall aesthetic experience scores, and the historical condition was found to lead to greater levels of cultural understanding and engagement. Future investigation within an ecologically valid setting is currently underway, examining the contribution of different live viewing elements to the slow looking experience.

The field of empirical aesthetics sets out to understand and predict our aesthetic preferences (Palmer et al., Annual Review of Psychology 64(1):77–107, 2013). Its history dates back to the birth of visual psychophysics and the work of Gustav Fechner (Vorschule der aesthetik (Vol. 1). Brietkopf & Härtel, 1876), while multiple models of aesthetic experience have been proposed in the intervening years (Chatterjee A, Vartanian O, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18(7):370–375, 2014; Leder H et al., British Journal of Psychology 95(4):489–508, 2004; Pelowski M et al., Physics of Life Reviews 21:80–125, 2017). This chapter briefly sets out the history of empirical aesthetics, and the state of the research field at present. I outline recent work on inter-observer agreement in aesthetic preference, before presenting empirical work that argues the importance of first objective (characteristics of stimuli) and then subjective (characteristics of context) factors in shaping aesthetic preference. Considering the role of properties of the stimulus, I will review literature on the relationship between aesthetic preference and symmetry, shape, compositional structure, colour and complexity as well as considering the potential role of statistical properties of images. I will then review putative subjective predictors of aesthetic preference including the role of context, framing and the influence of information about the artist and the artistic process. Both subjective and objective approaches will be evaluated from an individual differences perspective, focusing on the mediating role of familiarity, expertise, culture, cognitive ability and personality. Finally, I will attempt to draw these approaches together with reference to aesthetic sensitivity: an individual observer’s propensity to have an aesthetic response to a particular objective image characteristic, and will explore some putative factors that may modulate and explain individual differences in aesthetic sensitivity.

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

Conflicting empirical and theoretical accounts suggest that dyslexia is associated with either average, enhanced, or impoverished high-level visuospatial processing relative to controls. Such heterogeneous results could be due to the presence of wider variability in dyslexic samples, which is unlikely to be identified at the single study level, due to lack of power. To address this, the current study reports a meta-analysis of means and variances in high-level visuospatial ability in 909 non-dyslexic and 956 dyslexic individuals. The findings suggest that dyslexia is associated not only with a lower mean performance on visuospatial tasks, but also with greater variability in performance. Through novel meta-analytic techniques, we demonstrate a negative effect size for mean differences (-.457), but a positive effect size for SD differences (+.118; SD ratio = 1.107). In doing so, this is the first study to demonstrate impoverished visuospatial processing of the majority of individuals with dyslexia in addition to greater variance in performance in this group. The findings advocate for further consideration of both the presence of, and reasons for, increased variance in perception, attention and memory across neurodevelopmental disorders.

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology increasingly becomes a feature of everyday life, it is important to understand how creative acts, regarded as uniquely human, can be valued if produced by a machine. The current studies sought to investigate how observers respond to works of visual art created either by humans or by computers. Study 1 tested observers’ ability to discriminate between computer-generated and man-made art, and then examined how categorisation of art works impacted on perceived aesthetic value, revealing a bias against computer-generated art. In Study 2 this bias was reproduced in the context of robotic art, however it was found to be reversed when observers were given the opportunity to see robotic artists in action. These findings reveal an explicit prejudice against computergenerated art, driven largely by the kind of art observers believe computer algorithms are capable of producing. These prejudices can be overridden in circumstances in which observers are able to infer anthropomorphic characteristics in the computer programs, a finding which has implications for the future of artistic AI.

Since its initial development, the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) has been used extensively to measure local-global perceptual style. However, little is known about the perceptual factors that\ud influence target detection. The current study aimed to investigate disembedding in children with and without ASD, aged 8-15y, using the newly developed, stimulus-controlled L-EFT, M-EFT and D-EFT. Firstly, results revealed superior disembedding for children with ASD, irrespective of the type of target or embedding context, although the ASD group took more time in both the M-EFT and D-EFT. Secondly, the number of target lines continuing into the context proved more of a hindrance for the controls. Taken together, these findings provide strong evidence to support the notion of superior disembedding in ASDSince its initial development, the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) has been used extensively to\ud measure local-global perceptual style. However, little is known about the perceptual factors that influence target detection. The current study aimed to investigate disembedding in children with and without ASD, aged 8-15y, using the newly developed, stimulus-controlled L-EFT, M-EFT and D-EFT. Firstly, results revealed superior disembedding for children with ASD, irrespective of the type of target or embedding context, although the ASD group took more time in both the M-EFT and D-EFT. Secondly, the number of target lines continuing into the context proved more of a hindrance for the controls. Taken together, these findings provide strong evidence to support the notion of superior disembedding in ASD.

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.

© 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

The ability to draw is a uniquely human activity, ubiquitous in childhood but seldom performed at expert levels in adulthood. Relative to other domains of expertise (chess, music, sport), drawing is understudied, and yet because it is a universal developmental ability mastered by so few, it provides an ideal test bed for competing theories of expertise. In this review, three strands of active research and debate in the field of expertise will be considered in relation to representational drawing ability: (a) the characterization of expertise in relation to altered visual attention and memory, (b) the relative roles of personality traits and cognitive abilities, and (c) the interaction between genes and environment in the development of expertise. The study of representational drawing sheds new light on these three strands and provides rich avenues for further research in this domain.

Research suggests that expertise typically is acquired as a result of deliberate practice and a flexible approach to strategies for learning. Representational drawing is a complex skill which underpins performance in many branches of the visual arts and has the characteristics of other domains of expertise. It is therefore likely that approaches to learning and certain types of practice characterize the development of expertise in this domain. The current study aimed to investigate how differences in the acquisition of representational drawing skill could be explained by individual differences in personality, approaches to learning, and practice. A cohort of art students (n 682) completed questionnaires about their artistic ability, personality, and approaches to learning. A subset completed tasks of drawing ability (n 301), the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure test (ROCFT), and an IQ test (Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices). Drawing ability related to time spent drawing and use of drawing techniques, with additional independent effects of the copying and recalling a complex geometric figure. Personality predicted approaches to learning, which in turn predicted differences in the outcome variables: practice, use of techniques, and drawing ability. Personality did not directly predict drawing ability when approaches to learning were taken into account. Surface learners spent more time drawing, learned fewer techniques, and acquired a lower level of skill and strategic learners acquired a higher level of drawing skill. The resulting model of drawing ability development can be applied to expertise in a range of creative and noncreative domains

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 article reports on a series of drawing workshops held at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, which tested an original pedagogical strategy designed to help dyslexic and/or dyspraxic art and design students who had reported difficulties with their abilities to make accurate representational drawings. A group of non-dyslexic/dyspraxic RCA students volunteered as control group, and both cohorts completed three days of workshops in the Drawing Studio of the RCA. Results of recorded interviews eliciting student observations as they drew, and a questionnaire in the form of a Likert scale, administered before and after the workshop, indicate positive shifts in both cohorts’ attitudes towards specific aspects of the stages involved in the production of accurate representational drawings of still-life set-ups, the human skeleton and the clothed life-model. Assessment of the drawings produced indicates positive shifts in the two cohorts in geometric accuracy and other qualitative criteria embedded in the teaching strategy such as control of scale, proportion and illusions of depth. Both cohorts displayed similar positive attitude shifts and both sets of drawings indicated similar positive shifts in visual qualities. An interim conclusion posits that the pedagogical strategy appears to enhance the abilities of both dyslexic/dyspraxic students and non-dyslexic/dyspraxic students to make accurate representational drawings. This result correlates closely with the findings of an earlier, prototype workshop held at the RCA in July 2012. It is suggested that similar pedagogically inclusive strategies might produce positive results in the context of secondary schools as part of a more inclusive curriculum.

We use the example of art-derived solace to discuss a broader mechanism by which negative affect is instrumental in creating positive appreciation of artworks. Based on the theory of predictive processing, we argue that increasing attunement or reduction of prediction errors, which implies increasing validation of the agent(‘s models), is experienced as positive, even if the artwork’s content is negative. ispartof: Behavioral and Brain Sciences vol:40 pages:41-42 ispartof: location:England status: published

Has 20 years of separation between the Republics of Moldova and Pridnestrovie (Transnistria, PMR) generated a division in attitudes and beliefs in the two populations? Using near-simultaneous social scientific surveys from the summer of 2010 in the two republics, we measured four localized geopolitical divides: the local economies, historical memories, political legitimacies, and geopolitical orientations. Our findings challenge the notion that Moldova’s territorial disunion has produced separate experiential and attitudinal worlds. Complicating geopolitical commentary that locates an East-West fault-line running through Moldova, we find that separateness has not created an attitudinal chasm, but prospects of ending the separation are not supported by the surveys.

A large body of research reports individual differences in local and global visual processing in relation to expertise, culture and psychopathology. However, recent research has suggested that various different measures of local-global processing are not strongly associated with one another, calling its construct validity into question. The current study sought to further explore the validity of local-global processing biases in perception by developing three tasks based on two existing paradigms: the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) and the Navon hierarchical letters task. The newly developed tasks aimed to control for stimulus and response factors that may have impacted upon the reliability of previous research. They were administered to a large sample of undergraduate students (N > 100). The results of two new versions of the EFT indicated that disembedding performance is influenced by the structure of the embedding context. In addition, global precedence and interference in the Navon task remained present even when local attentional approaches to global hierarchical stimuli were restricted. Inter-task correlations within the EFT were high but low between the EFT and the Navon task, lending support to the notion that local-global processing is not a monolithic construct, but representative of a number of distinct perceptual abilities and biases. Future research may use these task distinctions to pinpoint more precisely which aspects of perceptual processing characterise specific (clinical) participant populations.

The difficulty adults find in drawing objects or scenes from real life is puzzling, assuming that there are few gross individual differences in the phenomenology of visual scenes and in fine motor control in the neurologically healthy population. A review of research concerning the perceptual, motoric and memorial correlates of drawing ability was conducted in order to understand why most adults err when trying to produce faithful representations of objects and scenes. The findings reveal that accurate perception of the subject and of the drawing is at the heart of drawing proficiency, although not to the extent that drawing skill elicits fundamental changes in visual perception. Instead, the decisive role of representational decisions reveals the importance of appropriate segmentation of the visual scene and of the influence of pictorial schemas. This leads to the conclusion that domain-specific, flexible, top-down control of visual attention plays a critical role in development of skill in visual art and may also be a window into creative thinking. publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The genesis of errors in drawing journaltitle: Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.04.002 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ispartof: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews vol:65 pages:195-207 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Some art students, despite being at art school, cannot draw very well, and would like to be able to draw well. It has been suggested that poor drawing may be a particular problem for students with dyslexia (and a high proportion of art school students is dyslexic). In Study 1 we studied 277 art students, using a questionnaire to assess self-perceived drawing ability and a range of background measures, including demography, education, a history of dyslexia, a self-administered spelling test, and personality and educational variables. In Study 2 we gave detailed drawing tests to a sample of 38 of the art students, stratified by self-rated drawing ability and spelling ability, and to 30 control participants. Students perceiving themselves as good at drawing did indeed draw better than self-perceived poor drawers, although the latter were still better than non-art student controls. In neither Study 1 nor Study 2 did skill at drawing relate to dyslexia or spelling ability, and neither did drawing ability relate to any of our wide range of background measures. However Study 2 did show that drawing ability was related both to ability at copying simple angles and proportions (using the “house” task of Cain, 1943), and also to visual memory (as suggested by Jones, 1922), poor drawers being less good at both immediate and delayed recall of the Rey-Osterrieth complex figure.

BackgroundThe Embedded Figures Test (EFT, developed by Witkin and colleagues (1971)) has been used extensively in research on individual differences, particularly in the study of autism spectrum disorder. The EFT was originally conceptualized as a measure of field (in)dependence, but in recent years performance on the EFT has been interpreted as a measure of local versus global perceptual style. Although many have used the EFT to measure perceptual style, relatively few have focused on understanding the stimulus features that cause a shape to become embedded. The primary aim of this work was to investigate the relation between the strength of embedding and perceptual grouping on a group level.MethodNew embedded figure stimuli (both targets and contexts) were developed in which stimulus features that may influence perceptual grouping were explicitly manipulated. The symmetry, closure and complexity of the target shape were manipulated as well as its good continuation by varying the number of lines from the target that continued into the context. We evaluated the effect of these four stimulus features on target detection in a new embedded figures task (Leuven Embedded Figures Test, L-EFT) in a group of undergraduate psychology students. The results were then replicated in a second experiment using a slightly different version of the task.ResultsStimulus features that influence perceptual grouping, especially good continuation and symmetry, clearly affected performance (lower accuracy, slower response times) on the L-EFT. Closure did not yield results in line with our predictions.DiscussionThese results show that some stimulus features, which are known to affect perceptual grouping, also influence how effectively a stimulus becomes embedded in different contexts. Whether these results imply that the EFT measures individual differences in perceptual grouping ability must be further investigated.

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.

How do our abilities to process number and other continuous quantities such as time and space relate to each other? Recent evidence suggests that these abilities share common magnitude processing and neural resources, although other findings also highlight the role of dimension-specific processes. To further characterize the relation between number, time, and space, we first examined them in a population with a developmental numerical dysfunction (developmental dyscalculia) and then assessed the extent to which these abilities correlated both behaviorally and anatomically in numerically normal participants. We found that (1) participants with dyscalculia showed preserved continuous quantity processing and (2) in numerically normal adults, numerical and continuous quantity abilities were at least partially dissociated both behaviorally and anatomically. Specifically, gray matter volume correlated with both measures of numerical and continuous quantity processing in the right TPJ; in contrast, individual differences in number proficiency were associated with gray matter volume in number-specific cortical regions in the right parietal lobe. Together, our new converging evidence of selective numerical impairment and of number-specific brain areas at least partially distinct from common magnitude areas suggests that the human brain is equipped with different ways of quantifying the outside world.