How generative drawing affects the learning process: An eye‐tracking analysis

Generative drawing is a learning strategy in which students draw illustrations while reading a text to depict the content of the lesson. In two experiments, students were asked to generate drawings as they read a scientific text or read the same text on influenza with author‐provided illustrations (Experiment 1) or to generate drawings or write verbal summaries as they read (Experiment 2). An examination of students' eye movements during learning showed that students who engaged in generative drawing displayed more rereadings of words, higher proportion of fixations on the important words, higher rate of transitions between words and workspace, and higher proportion of transitions between important words and workspace than students given a text lesson with author‐generated illustrations (Experiment 1) or students who were asked to write a summary (Experiment 2). These findings contribute new evidence to guide theories for explaining how generative drawing affects learning processes.     

Educational Intervention and the Development of Young Art Students' Talent and Creativity

This study focuses on behavior associated with young art students' developing artistic talent (skills and art‐making behavior) and creativity (personal expressions of visual information). The study examines the role of personal expertise in a student's development of problem finding, domain‐specific technical skill, perseverance, evaluation, and creative ideation. The study compares 30 experienced art students' artistic processing and products with those of 29 novice art students. Both groups are 7‐ through 11‐year‐olds. The author recorded participants' behavior as they created drawings in two contexts — from imagination and from life — and three adult artists then assessed the technical skill and creativity revealed in the drawings. Multivariate analyses of the variables associated with the drawing products and processes offer evidence of the changes related to the students' developing expertise in both novice and experienced groups. This study finds that the drawing situation (life or imagination) interacts clearly with the relationships among hypothesized components of creativity, gender, and predictors of expertise. Technical skill, perseverance, modifications, and creativity in drawings from life were significant predictors of expertise. Modifications, efficient problem finding, and creativity in drawings from imagination were additional significant predictors of expertise. Gender was found to be a measurable factor in both the artistic process and the assessments of drawings from imagination. The findings are discussed within the context of three conceptions: artistic talent, developing creativity, and art education.     

The effect of discordant sensory information in graphic production: two distinct subject groups

The present study investigated the underlying processes used to cope with discordant sensory information induced in a mirror-drawing task. Two experiments were carried out in which adults copied simple geometrical figures made up of either horizontal and vertical segments or oblique segments meeting at a right angle in both a normal and a mirror condition. Experiment 1 identified individual differences in relation to preferred graphic movement directions; some subjects preserved the visual directions that occurred in normal drawing by reversing the direction of drawing movements (perceived-direction group), while others preserved normal drawing directions that produced reversed visual directions (performed-direction group). Experiment 2 was performed to elucidate whether these two distinct behaviors resulted from different strategies used to cope with visuo-proprioceptive discordances. The main results showed that preference for the perceived directions led to longer pauses, slower movement velocity, greater movement dysfluency, and greater spatial orientation accuracy. By contrast, longer reaction time and greater angular accuracy characterized performance in the performed-direction group. These results were interpreted as indicating that two distinct information-processing strategies can be used when resolving sensory discordance in graphic production.     

Experience as art

Chinese philosophy views experience as intrinsically aesthetic. This world view could be elucidated through a consideration of John Dewey's aesthetics and features of Chinese art. Dewey's philosophy of art starts with an understanding of experience as ‘live processes’ of living creatures interacting with their environment. Such processes are autopoietic in being self‐sustaining, ever‐changing, capable of increasing complexity, capable of generating novelty, direction and progress on its own. Its autopoietic character is a precondition of the aesthetic in the process of experience. An aesthetic experience is rhythmic, focused, consummatory, and reaches beyond the transitory boundaries of concrete existence. The aesthetic is not confined to what is conventionally identified as art. Most important, the ethical‐political, the natural and the cosmic all have an aesthetic aspect, as the paper attempts to show by examining classical Confucianism.     

Foreshortening and the perception of parallel projections

Does picture perception follow polar projective geometry? Parallel projection drawings, which are not produced by using rules of polar projection, are widely regarded as visually acceptable representations of three-dimensional (3-D) objects in free viewing. One explanation is that they are perceived by means of a system in which there is no foreshortening. If so, edges of a 3-D block in 1∶1 proportions should be denoted by lines in 1∶1 proportions on the picture surface. However, three experiments suggest that the perception of parallel projections of a block involves foreshortening. In Experiment 1, 90 subjects were shown a set of parallel projections of a cube, in which each drawing depicted three sides of the cube, drawn as a square with obliques—a frontal square with receding edges shown by parallel obliques of various lengths. The subjects preferred a drawing with a receding side length that was considerably foreshortened in relation to the front side. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects viewed drawings of three blocks that differed in the ratios of the lengths of their receding edges to their frontal edges (1∶1, 1∶2, and 1∶0.65). In Experiment 2, the subjects were shown square-with-obliques drawings of the three blocks with receding edges shown by parallel obliques of various lengths. Again, the subjects preferred drawings with a receding side that was foreshortened. In Experiment 3, the drawings showed two sides of a block. The receding dimension was drawn with parallel or converging lines. The preferred foreshortening was not a fixed ratio of the dimensions of the 3-D blocks. We suggest that square-with-obliques parallel projections showing cubes are taken by vision to be approximations to projections using foreshortening. We suggest also that as the line showing the receding edge elongates, foreshortening becomes less of a factor.     

Imitation,Inspiration, and Creation: Cognitive Process of Creative Drawing by Copying Others' Artworks

To investigate the cognitive processes underlying creative inspiration, we tested the extent to which viewing or copying prior examples impacted creative output in art. In Experiment 1, undergraduates made drawings under three conditions: (a) copying an artist's drawing, then producing an original drawing; (b) producing an original drawing without having seen another's work; and (c) copying another artist's work, then reproducing that artist's style independently. We discovered that through copying unfamiliar abstract drawings, participants were able to produce creative drawings qualitatively different from the model drawings. Process analyses suggested that participants' cognitive constraints became relaxed, and new perspectives were formed from copying another's artwork. Experiment 2 showed that exposure to styles of artwork considered unfamiliar facilitated creativity in drawing, while styles considered familiar did not do so. Experiment 3 showed that both copying and thoroughly viewing artwork executed using an unfamiliar style facilitated creativity in drawing, whereas merely thinking about alternative styles of artistic representation did not do so. These experiments revealed that deep encounters with unfamiliar artworks—whether through copying or prolonged observation—change people's cognitive representations of the act of drawing to produce novel artwork.     

Does Children's Colour Use Reflect the Emotional Content of their Drawings?

When children draw in clinical contexts, clinicians sometimes rely on children's colour use to make inferences about their emotional reaction to the subject of the drawing. Here, we examined whether children use colour to portray emotion in their drawings. In Experiment 1, children indicated their colour preferences and then coloured in outlines of figures characterized as nasty or nice. Children also drew complex, multi‐coloured pictures about their own happy or sad experiences. In Experiment 2, hospitalized children drew about being worried or scared in hospital and about their positive experiences. In both experiments, we examined the relation between children's colour use and their colour preferences. Three‐ to 10‐year‐old children used more preferred colours to colour in the nice outline. Although they were more likely to use non‐preferred colours to colour in the nasty outline, they tended to used a mix of preferred and non‐preferred colours. When both normal and hospitalized children produced drawings about positive and negative events, there was no relation between children's colour choices and their colour preferences; children primarily used preferred colours. These data suggest that clinicians should exercise extreme caution when interpreting the meaning of colour in children's drawings. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME IN NATURAL SCIENCE

The various aesthetic phenomena found repeatedly in the scientific enterprise stem from the role of God as artist. If the Creator is an artist, how and why natural scientists study the divine art work can be understood using theological aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The aesthetic phenomena considered here are as follows. First, science reveals beauty and the sublime in natural phenomena. Second, science discovers beauty and the sublime in the theories that are developed to explain natural phenomena. Third, the search for beauty often guides scientists in their work. Fourth, where beauty is perceived, feelings of the sublime often also follow upon further contemplation. This linkage of beauty in science with truth and the sublime runs counter to most aesthetic theory since Kant. Scholarship in theological aesthetics has recently argued that the modern and postmodern elevation of the sublime over beauty is merely a preference that reveals a bias against transcendence—against God. If doing and understanding science can show this sundering of the sublime from the beautiful to be in error, science also gives evidence of transcendence.     

The development of children's expressive drawing

Two studies are presented on expressive happy and sad drawings made by British 4‐ to 12‐year‐olds (n = 80 and 160, respectively) in which the drawings were assessed individually for the quantity and quality of expressive devices. Quantity was measured in the number of appropriate expressive content themes and formal properties evident in each drawing. Quality was rated on a Likert scale on the extent to which the drawing expressed the intended mood. Both the quantity and quality of expressive happy and sad drawings of predetermined and free topics increased with age. Improvements in content expression, but much less so with expressive formal properties, accounted for the development of quantity. A slower period of development between 6 and 9 years for both measures was consistently found, with a significant improvement often shown among the 12‐year‐olds. The finding that happy drawings were scored higher than sad drawings is explained in respect of adult and child expectations of pictures. Correlations between expressive scores and performance on a visual realism drawing task tentatively indicated that expressive and realism skills in drawing are only weakly related. The development of expressive drawing is considered in the context of the delivery of art education in schools.     

A new conception of visual aesthetic sensitivity

Aesthetic sensitivity has been defined as the ability to recognize and appreciate beauty and compositional excellence, and to judge artistic merit according to standards of aesthetic value. The Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test (VAST) has often been used to assess this ability, but recent research has revealed it has several psychometric problems. Such problems are not easily remedied, because they reflect flawed assumptions inherent to the concept of aesthetic sensitivity as traditionally understood, and to the VAST itself. We introduce a new conception of aesthetic sensitivity defined as the extent to which someone's aesthetic valuation is influenced by a given feature. Experiment 1 aimed to characterize aesthetic sensitivity to four prominent features in visual aesthetics: complexity, symmetry, contour, and balance. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the findings of Experiment 1 and to assess the test–retest reliability of an instrument designed to measure aesthetic sensitivity to these features using an abridged set of stimuli. Our results reveal that people differ remarkably in the extent to which visual features influence their liking, highlighting the crucial role of individual variation when modelling aesthetic preferences. We did not find clear relations between the four measures of aesthetic sensitivity and personality, intelligence, and art interest and knowledge. Finally, our measurement instrument exhibited an adequate-to-good test–retest reliability.     

Is Perception the Canonical Route to Aesthetic Judgment?

It is commonplace amongst philosophers of art to make claims that postulate important links between aesthetics and perception. In this paper, I focus on one such claim—that perception is the canonical route to aesthetic judgment. I consider a range of prima facie plausible interpretations of this claim, and argue that each fails to identify any important link between aesthetic judgment and perception. Given this, I conclude that we have good reason to be sceptical of the claim that perception is in any way privileged as a source of aesthetic judgment.     

Relationship between directionality and orientation in drawings by young children and adults

The present study examined the relationship between directionality of drawing movements and the orientation of drawn products in right-handed adults and young children for 27 Japanese kindergartners and 29 Japanese university students who were asked to draw with each hand fishes in side view and circles from several starting points. Significant values of chi2 for distributions of frequencies of orientation of the fish drawings and the direction of circular drawing movement indicated that adult right-handers drawing the fish facing to the left tended to draw a circle clock-wise when they drew with the dominant hand, while there was no such significant relationship in young children's drawings. This result may suggest that the reading and writing habits may be implicated in the direction of drawing movements with the dominant hand, and this directional bias of drawing movement in the dominant hand can appear in the orientation of finished drawings.     

Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics

ABSTRACT What have natural aesthetics and environmentalism in common? Not much if the former deals with nature as if it were an artwork or a gallery of art objects, or if the latter grounds the protection of nature in consequentialist terms. Suppose, however, one adopts a non-consequentialist environmentalism which, further, stakes out a primary view of nature as terrain rather than as habitat; i.e., a view which is not biocentric (life-centred), let alone anthropocentric. This environmentalism is rooted in the belief that we are prima facie bound not to interfere in any of the world undefined by culture whether or not it supports life. There is a reason forbidding us from strip-mining the far side of the moon, say, even though no habitat is thereby destroyed, nor is there any blight creating visual offence to those immediately affected. To furnish the reason for such an ‘acentric’environmentalism, one needs a natural aesthetic. Why? By elimination, because the stock appeals grounding any moral stance—to rights or interests or happiness or autonomy—are unavailable. The ‘subject’of an acentric environmentalism is insensate. But an ‘acentric’aesthetic seems even more curious than its environmentalist dependent. It would entail an aesthetic viewpoint indifferent to human scale and perspective, the very factors which underwrite any cultural aesthetic. So, is such an aesthetic possible? The barest glimpse of how it might look concludes this paper.     

Tangible pictures: viewpoint effects and linear perspective in visually impaired people

Perception of raised-line pictures in blindfolded-sighted, congenitally blind, late-blind, and low-vision subjects was studied in a series of experiments. The major aim of the study was to examine the value of perspective drawings for haptic pictures and visually impaired individuals. In experiment 1, subjects felt two wooden boards joined at 45 degrees, 90 degrees, or 135 degrees, and were instructed to pick the correct perspective drawing from among four choices. The first experiment on perspective found a significant effect of visual status, with much higher performance by the low-vision subjects. Mean performance for the congenitally blind subjects was not significantly different from that of the late-blind and blindfolded-sighted subjects. In a further experiment, blindfolded subjects drew tangible pictures of three-dimensional (3-D) geometric solids, and then engaged in a matching task. Counter to expectations, performance was not impaired for the 3-D drawings as compared with the frontal viewpoints. Subjects were also especially fast and more accurate when matching top views. Experiment 5 showed that top views were easiest for all of the visually impaired subjects, including those who were congenitally blind. Experiment 5 yielded higher performance for 3-D than frontal viewpoints. The results of all of the experiments were consistent with the idea that visual experience is not necessary for understanding perspective drawings of geometrical objects.     

Beauty and Aesthetic Experience in Theravāda Buddhism

The following essay deals with the specificity of aesthetic experience and apprehension of beauty in the frame of Theravāda Buddhism. This essay is aimed, above all, to Western readers, since aesthetics and beauty, as an inherent quality of nature and works of art, are constitutive parts of the Western philosophical and cultural tradition. I consider texts written in Western languages and available in the Western debate. On the one hand, so far as aesthetics is concerned, as a philosophical reflection on beauty and art, Theravāda Buddhism may seem to be critical towards any kind of aesthetical experience. On the other hand, Theravāda Buddhism can offer a different and peculiar perspective on art and beauty. The aim is to demonstrate that there is a specific aesthetic experience in Theravāda Buddhism and this experience allows a different perception and use of the work of art and a different experience of beauty.     

Beauty: Neglected,but alive and kicking

This article is a commentary on ‘Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments: The aesthetic episode – developments and challenges in empirical aesthetics’ (Leder & Nadal, 2014, this issue). It focuses on the importance of beauty in aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. Beauty is considered as a formal inherent property of visual stimuli that has the potential to elicit visual pleasure by direct sensory stimulation. It is argued that any comprehensive model of aesthetic experience must account fully for cognitive aspects of aesthetics (cultural, conceptual, psychological, and individual factors) as well as intrinsic properties of beautiful visual stimuli and how they relate to basic mechanisms of visual perception, which are universal among humans.     

Warmth,spatial proximity,and social attachment: The embodied perception of a social metaphor

Recent experiments in embodied social cognition suggest a fundamental link between physical warmth and social affiliation. Findings from two experiments support the hypothesis that physical warmth serves as a symbolic cue signaling the close proximity of a source of affiliation. In Experiment 1, participants perceived a warm object as being physically closer than a cold object. In Experiment 2, being primed with warmth led participants to display higher levels of self-reported social affiliative motivation. In both studies, effects were moderated by individual differences in attachment style; priming effects were pronounced among those low in attachment avoidance and those high in attachment anxiety. These findings contribute to a growing literature suggesting deep connections between perception, physical experience, and social cognition.     

美术专业与普通专业学生对中西方绘画作品的审美认知差异

审美认知是人类最高级最复杂的心理活动之一,在美育中具有重要的作用。本研究采用不同艺术类别及情绪效价的作品图片,考察美术专业与普通专业大学生对中西方绘画作品的审美认知差异。结果发现：美术专业学生与普通学生对西方画的审美认知差异极其显著,且美术专业学生对西方画产生的美感显著强于普通学生;而两类学生对中国画的审美认知差异并不显著;对于不同风格的绘画作品,两类学生都存在着审美偏好,且审美偏好一致,都对中国画产生的美感更为强烈;两类学生的审美认知反应时间差异极其显著,专业学生总体上要比普通学生进行更多更复杂的审美认知加工活动。研究表明,审美认知具有较强的可塑性,对于美育心理学的发展具有重要的价值。