Psychology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven, Belgium.
Br J Psychol. 2018 May;109(2):244-258. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12253. Epub 2017 Jun 28.
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.
艺术家们经常报告说，以新颖有趣的方式观察熟悉的刺激物在视觉艺术创作中起着作用。然而，支持这种能力的注意力机制尚未得到充分研究。更具体地说，目前尚不清楚以新颖有趣的方式重新解释视觉刺激的能力是否是由注意力的内源性转换所促进的，以及它是否与抑制和反应转换等执行功能相关。为了解决这个问题，本研究在一组学习艺术和非艺术科目的本科生样本（N=141）中探索了模糊图形反转和执行功能。艺术学生在模糊图形任务中表现出更频繁的感知反转，无论是被动观察刺激还是主动诱发感知反转，但是在要求他们主动保持特定感知时，与非艺术学生没有差异。此外，艺术学生在执行抑制任务中抑制干扰侧翼的能力比非艺术学生差。研究结果表明，艺术学生比非艺术学生更容易引发内源性注意力转移，但这种能力与增强的执行功能没有直接关系。有人提出，艺术技能的特征可能是增加了感知灵活性，同时减少了认知抑制；然而，未来的研究将有必要确定视觉艺术中的哪些特定子技能与感知和执行功能的各个方面相关。
