Integrating art historical, psychological, and neuroscientific explanations of artists' advantages in drawing and perception.

Art historians, artists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have long asserted that artists perceive the world differently than nonartists. Although empirical research on the nature and correlates of skilled drawing is limited, the available evidence supports this view: artists outperform nonartists on visual analysis and form recognition tasks and their perceptual advantages are correlated with and can be largely accounted for by drawing skill. The authors propose an integrative model to explain these results, derived from research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience on how category knowledge, attention, and motor plans influence visual perception. The authors claim that (a) artists' specialized, declarative knowledge of the structure of objects' appearances and (b) motor priming achieved via proceduralization and practice in an artistic medium both contribute to attention-shifting mechanisms that enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and account for artists' advantages in drawing and visual analysis. Suggestions for testing the model are discussed. Skilled visual artists are able to create convincing representa- tional drawings and paintings; in contrast, realistic rendering is extraordinarily difficult for most nonartists. How can we under- stand this profound disparity? One long-standing explanation is that artists perceive the world differently than nonartists. This view has been espoused by artists (Goldwater & Treves, 1972; Schlewitt-Haynes, Earthman, & Burns, 2002), art instructors (Dodson, 1985; Hale, 1964), art critics and historians (Fry, 1919/ 1981; Gombrich, 1960; Ruskin, 1857/1971), psychologists (Arnheim, 1954; Cohen & Bennett, 1997; Kozbelt, 2001; Mitchell, Ropar, Ackroyd, & Rajendran, 2005), and neuroscientists (Chatterjee, 2004; Livingstone, 2002; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999; Zeki & Lamb, 1994). However, far from resolving the issue, this claim raises a host of additional questions. If the assertion is true, what is the nature of artists' perceptual differences? What mechanisms are involved? How are such differences related to drawing skill? In this article, we attempt to integrate these perspectives into a unified account and offer a provisional explanation of psycholog- ical mechanisms underlying artists' drawing and perceptual abili- ties. Although the psychological basis of skilled drawing remains a relatively neglected area of investigation, the available evidence supports the claim that artists do perceive the world differently, and in some respects better, than nonartists. By better, we mean objectively measurable superior performance on tasks relevant to meaningful computational goals, such as recognizing objects in blurry or otherwise degraded images. We review theoretical per- spectives on artists' perceptual abilities from several disciplines and examine supporting empirical evidence. We then propose an integrative, interdisciplinary model to account for these results. The model is derived from recent research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience on the roles played by category knowledge and motor planning in visual attention and perception. We argue that artists develop attentional strategies that enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field. These strategies operate in two ways: (a) via specialized, declarative knowledge of the "struc- ture of appearances" of objects and scenes and (b) via motor priming achieved through proceduralization and practice of pro- ductive techniques in artistic media. Both of these focus attention on stimulus features relevant for adequate depiction. Because these features are also diagnostic for identifying objects, we argue that artists' attentional strategies account for their perceptual advan- tages as well. We conclude by proposing ways to test the model.