THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

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THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 73


Abstract
It has been argued that the function of art and
the function of the visual brain are one and the
same, and that the aims of art constitute an exten-
sion of the functions of the brain (Zeki 1999). In
this article we address a broader picture: that of
art making as an extension of visuo-motor coor-
dination. We focused on copy-drawing, because
the ability to draw lines to represent the perceived,
or imagined, visual appearance of objects in the
world is a building block of visual creativity; a fun-
damental question is that of understanding how
humans coordinate vision and action to achieve
this. We studied concurrent hand and eye move-
ments of naive subjects as they performed a simple
copy-drawing task. Despite considerable variability
among individuals, we were able to isolate some key
features of the drawing strategy that were shared
across all subjects, and provided a window into
the underlying neural processes. A computational
model that incorporated those features qualitatively
reproduced the data.


Introduction
Cognitive science, and in particular the analysis
of human vision and visual attention, have always
paid some attention to the visual arts. The latter
have provided a rich source of images that are situ-
ated somewhere between natural images — such as
pictures and videos of landscapes, animals, humans
—and synthetic images—the kind of visual displays
realized specifically for the purpose of experimen-
tally testing some visual behavior. Visual artworks


share some properties with both classes, because
a) they possess some degree of artificiality, being
images produced by humans and therefore possess-
ing the kind of features that have been called arti-
factual properties [88]; and b) they are as common
in our visual experience as natural images, since we
are exposed to visual artworks very often in daily
life (think of museums, books covers and illustra-
tions, advertisement). Furthermore, drawing is an
old practice (the oldest cave graffities dating back to
about 30,000 years ago), that is present in almost all
geographical and cultural areas.
The pioneer recordings of eye movements made
by Buswell (1935) and Yarbus (1967) used famous
paintings as the test image; many later examples
exist of analyses of the visual activity in response
to paintings and drawings, and recently visual art-
works have been used as well in neuroscientific
studies of the visual brain. The groundbreaking
work of Zeki (1999) proposed to not only use art-
works to probe human vision, but, conversely, to
gain an understanding of the aesthetic experience
on the basis of our knowledge of the neural pro-
cesses involved in perceiving artworks. Zeki argued
in (Zeki & Lamb 1994) that understanding the
neural correlates of artwork perception could give
not only some insight on aesthetic experience, but
also a deep understanding of the brain processes
involved in artwork creation — by comparing the
work of the artist to that of the neurologist, whose
ultimate aim is to induce specific patterns neural
activity (and therefore specific perceptual effects) in
the viewer.

Visuomotor Atoms of Copy-Drawing


Ruben Coen-Cagli
Department of Neuroscience
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Bronx, NY

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