The artist emerges: Visual art learning alters neural structure and function

How does the brain mediate visual artistic creativity? Here we studied behavioral and neural changes in drawing and painting students compared to students who did not study art. We investigated three aspects of cognition vital to many visual artists: creative cognition, perception, and perception-to...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Fla.), 2015-01, Vol.105, p.440-451
Main Authors: Schlegel, Alexander, Alexander, Prescott, Fogelson, Sergey V., Li, Xueting, Lu, Zhengang, Kohler, Peter J., Riley, Enrico, Tse, Peter U., Meng, Ming
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Behavior
Cerebellum
Cerebellum - physiology
Cerebral Cortex - physiology
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Creative cognition
Creativity
DTI
Female
fMRI
Humans
Learning - physiology
Male
Motor cortex
MVPA
Neuronal Plasticity - physiology
Paintings - psychology
Perception
Perception-to-action
Plasticity
Studies
Visual artists
White matter
White Matter - physiology
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:How does the brain mediate visual artistic creativity? Here we studied behavioral and neural changes in drawing and painting students compared to students who did not study art. We investigated three aspects of cognition vital to many visual artists: creative cognition, perception, and perception-to-action. We found that the art students became more creative via the reorganization of prefrontal white matter but did not find any significant changes in perceptual ability or related neural activity in the art students relative to the control group. Moreover, the art students improved in their ability to sketch human figures from observation, and multivariate patterns of cortical and cerebellar activity evoked by this drawing task became increasingly separable between art and non-art students. Our findings suggest that the emergence of visual artistic skills is supported by plasticity in neural pathways that enable creative cognition and mediate perceptuomotor integration. •Frontal white matter reorganized as art students became more creative.•Cortical and cerebellar activity patterns changed as drawing skills improved.•Visual art training did not entail improvements in purely perceptual abilities.
ISSN:1053-8119
1095-9572
DOI:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.11.014