70 TEACHERs COLLEGE COLUmbIA UNIvERsITy
Learning to Pause
Transformations of perception come about through
movement and knowledge of movement, through
physical engagement with the external world. As
Alva Noë (2004) emphasizes “perceiving is a way of
acting” and “not something that happens to us, or
in us. It is something we do” (p. 1).
I thought about skills that are easy to acquire
and come naturally to most people. To this end my
first instruction focuses on the unity of the body,
proprioception and our ability to synchronize
movement. Preliminary eye tracking data from a
recent strand of my research suggests that there
may be phases when the eye communicates with the
hand spatially rather than using any form of visual
memory. Rather, the hand is moving along the line
at the same time and at the same speed as the hand,
creating a physical motor translation rather than a
perception-to-action translation.
The instruction
Based on the finding that short simple segments
of line can be drawn without looking at the paper
I begin by asking students to practise moving their
eyes slowly along a line. Then they practise syncing
their eye and hand by moving the eye down a short
simple segment of line and at the same time draw
an equivalent line on paper with the hand. I explic-
itly describe this as drawing two lines of the same
length in space. Once this mode of drawing simple
lines is established, I introduce a way to locate the
segment on the page. I instruct them to look to the
paper just as they are completing the drawing of
each segment of line, to monitor the “landing” of
the line. Next I instruct them to pause before draw-
ing the next segment, to give time to assess accuracy
and choose a starting point for the next segment.
The premise is that the eye behaves like the
hand, offering a direct translation of movement. The
hand moves at the same speed as the eye, drawing
equivalent lines superimposed on the object-being-
drawn and on the drawing. This establishes a way
to draw an accurate line from life and encourages
students to draw only short segments of line. This
smooth slow way of moving the eye is easily learnt,
in contrast to some drawing instructions relying on
using an external measuring device e.g. measuring
with a pencil, which require mental calculations
and a less direct way to map from vision to the hand
movement. The instruction hinges on our proprio-
ceptive awareness, rather than attending to looking
alone. We start to learn to draw by attending to our
whole body and how it engages with the object.
As a first step towards learning to draw, this
divides cognitive and executive elements of obser-
vational drawing into two distinct phases. The
instruction establishes a clear division between
drawing and assessment behaviour, and establishes
the pause and the drawing of short simple lines.
There are two aims of the instruction: firstly to
explore whether this separation and explicit expla-
nation works well as an instruction, and secondly as
a model for further scientific testing. It has been dif-
ficult for psychologists to break down the complex
intertwining of processes involved in drawing. The
contrasting roles of the eye in the two phases may
facilitate studies of brain activity during drawing.Concluding thoughts about event
structures, the drawer’s mind and
attention to parts and whole
The instruction splits the drawing process into
two distinct phases, one executive and one cogni-
tive, i.e. drawing, and not drawing, wherein the
thinking takes place while not drawing, while paus-
ing. This is given as an explicit verbal instruction
to the student: to not think while they are drawing
and to think while they pause. On a micro-level, the
eye moves and pauses during each phase of move-
ment—the eye pauses and fixates and then saccades
to another spot. The conventional view is that thisFigure 4. The HandEye / Handsight – dancing to-
gether, sharing sensory and perceptual roles, learn-
ing from one another