DRAWING AS A COGNITIVE STRATEGY: PERCEPTION AND CRIATIVITY Paper presented at DUT Conference in Oporto, Portugal – 2013 Raquel Pelayo - mpelayo@arq.up.pt Teresa Fonseca – trefonseca@gmail.com Introduction “Drawing is the desire for intelligence” Álvaro Siza Today´s understanding of drawing widespread today all over the western teaching systems considers drawing an abstract language. The philosophy of such concept of drawing is semiotics and the main connection is the field of linguistics. [1]. We should keep in mind that this is a quite recent vision of drawing, still profoundly connected to the XX century iconoclast modernism and it has been preceded by very different drawing conceptions in the western culture previous to modernism. This concept of drawing focuses mainly on the communication factor looking at drawing as the same phenomenon as other images, such as photography or video, not taking into account the singularities of drawing. Since the end of the XXth century, we can see the signs of wearing out this drawing concept presents, namely, the growing discredit of present teaching models [2] profoundly eroded [3]. A reaction to this state of affairs is starting to form, structuring a possible alternative both to the current and to prior conceptions and teaching models, which never disappeared and coexisted in difficult hybridism’s [4] within the semiotic approach. This new emergent theoretical approach to drawing is a cognitive one and tries to understand the drawing phenomenon as a number of cognitive performances, that underlie drawing skills and its’ catching growing attention among researchers, both from arts and cognitive sciences. There are no news on pedagogical practices resulting from such an approach, although some experiments related to research are being conducted and shared in international forums such as the “Thinking through Drawing” symposium, in the Anglo-American world. The initial advantage of a cognitive approach to drawing is found in looking at drawing as a transversal phenomenon, leaving behind the idea that drawing is an area of specialized knowledge and, conversely, claiming that it is an important conceptual tool, concerning all knowledge fields. We can easily guess the difficulties such a vision of drawing will have to be assimilated by the present education system for it has been founded within the illuminist vision of knowledge separation and specialization. On the other hand, this can be a great opportunity to contribute to the emergence of another education structure, more suited for future challenges western society is already facing [5]. Following the establishment of a modernity, that carried out a passion for abstraction, from the postwar until today, drawing from observation has been unfairly relegated to the condition of a curiosity, within the specialized field of art [6], nonetheless this kind of drawing is the one that deals directly with the most important human cognitive process i.e. perception. So it is worth further reflecting on this kind of drawing. Cognitive processes underlying drawing skill Known cognitive processes are divided into the primary ones - perception and memory -, followed by the intermediate ones such as language and general Knowledge and, finally, the high-order ones, that depend on the previous ones - decision making, problem solving and logical thinking [7]. The exercise of drawing from observation involves all cognitive processes, with a special emphasis on the primary ones, perception and memory, but also decision making and problem solving, among the more complex ones. This is not surprising if we take into account that human brain is, above all, an image processor, not a word processor, and the specific brain areas for such image processing is more than half the brain, a far superior area than the one devoted to deal with abstract information [8]. In daily life, human brain is capable of capturing, interpreting, managing and generating visual information, just as we open our eyes to see and interact with our environment, or when we close them to sleep and produce, while dreaming, a stream of mental imagery. Therefore, we take perception for granted and wrongly think that it is carried out without any brain effort and we take this idea further, assuming that it cannot be educated. For that reason, teaching mainly focuses on language development, meaning artificial codification systems, socially constructed, such as written languages, mathematical codes or music notation codes, and the general knowledge these codes convey. Nonetheless, sensorial perceptions, which, along with memory, form the human knowledge acquisition apparatus, offer a huge source for teaching to enhance learning processes that hasn’t been fully explored yet, given that memory is receiving almost all the education system’s attention. The question is whether or not it is possible to work on it, improving perception performance through teaching, and if having such an enhanced perception is an advantage for individuals. Once it is a basic cognitive performance, it has a strong potential to be an improvement factor of the higher-order cognitive operations, since true teaching develops competences, more than just stimulating contents accumulation. Drawing from observation Drawing from observation is a very sophisticated exercise humans have developed through their evolutionary process, for over 7.000 years, and it is the base of all graphic abstract codes invented, from the alphabets to arabic numerals. Conversely to those codes, this hand drawing is a cognitive challenge that directly deals with the perceptual process, which, in turn, deals with uncoded information in the light array patterns entering the eye. Its potential for increasing human cognitive ability is huge precisely because it deals, simultaneously, with sensorial processes of knowledge acquisition and the production of signifying syntheses of that same information. But, does learning how to draw from observation alter the individual’s perceptual processing? And does it improve the acquisition, interpretation, management and generation of information in human brain? Recent experiments [9] using eye-tracking technology have shown that the perception processing of a trained draughtsman, during the execution of an observational drawing is different from his usual performance as far as the level of the eyes’ fixation, duration and frequency is concerned. These experimental researches showed that usual eye movements are driven by the visual stimuli properties, whereas, in the drawing case the individual is in control of those movements. Therefore, the first is typically a bottom-up driven process, responding to the light array pattern in the stimulus, whereas the second is a top-down driven process, led by previous conceptualizations or some sort of inquiry. Another experiment using fMRY technology [10] has shown differences between activated brain areas, during the execution of a quick small drawing from a photograph, by a experimented draughtsman and a beginner. The first activated less perceptual brain area than the second, mainly activating brain areas linked to higher-order cognitive processes. These findings show that high competence in drawing from observation involves higher-order cognitive processes and not perception alone, and this reinforces the idea that drawing from observation is mainly about interpreting. If the cognitive process is less bottom-up and more top-down, this means that knowing how to draw implies an interpretation that involves previous knowledge that can be conducting the process, and not the opposite, as Gombrich suspected when he referred to a “schemata” [15]. Learning how to draw is not an inborn skill or as an easy task as it can look. In fact, before you get how to do it, it is quite difficult, implying effort and training. Anyone can learn it through a specific learning process that is intended to change the usual visual routines to new ones appropriated to the new task. It also means a broadening of the cognitive ability to process sensorial information from its capture, interpretation, management and generation. Drawing perceptual functioning: Object recognition and memory performance As teachers, we are well aware of the numerous constraints presented by learning how to draw as well as the gains such ability represent to students. It is no longer about “learning how to see”, as Ruskin [11] put it and Edwards [17] lead to the extreme in her drawing method, it is more about “implementing new software in the brain’s hardware”. Anyone can learn how to draw from observation because seeing is already a representation, although a mental one. To see is the result of automatic and unconscious brain computations, starting with the light stimulus in the retina [12], synchronized with other sensory gathering of information that forms a whole. According to Matlin [6], in cognition, perception is an active cognitive process in which individuals search for information. This process is dynamic, given that attention and memory mechanisms work together. In order to see, humans use previous knowledge stored in long term memory, to gather and interpret the stimulus registered by the senses. Object recognition is one of the most relevant tasks in daily life. It consists in identifying a complex arrangement of stimuli but it is not a rigid process, once it combines top-down and bottom-up processes. Therefore, our concepts, or even our expectations, play an important part and memory play an important role as well. Sometimes, the top-down process is overly active leading to error recognition. Nonetheless, it is crucial when dealing with incomplete and/or ambiguous stimuli or even when these are presented in split seconds. The abuse of visual topdown processing is common and not only does it promote recognition errors but also leads individuals to completely ignore stimulus information (change blindness, and inattentional blindness) due to failing to see changes in the stimuli for focusing attention on some other aspect within the stimulus or as result of a sudden and out of context change in it. Can the use and/or abuse of top-down processes also take place in the drawing from observation performance? What can the results of such phenomenon be? In 2010, we conducted an experiment with twenty two students attending Desenho 1 class in the architecture course at FAUP. This experiment intended to set in motion an automatic and semiconscious drawing process to access mental images [13] through extreme execution quickness. We asked students to draw an object, using pencil or pen in ten seconds following the announcement of the object’s name (chair). Students did not know they were participating in an experiment, once the task was presented as a drawing class activity. The resulting drawings showed all participants were able to complete the task within time and they produced, without exception, an object centered image. In fact, all the images were quite similar; 91% of the drawings were intuitive axonometric representations and only 9% were views. No intuitive perspective was found. Amongst intuitive axonometric representations, 54% were isometrics like and 36% oblique projections like. It was showed concluded that the brain is able to very quickly produce a mental image of a visual object concept. The mental images similitude amongst participants’ drawings suggests the brain performs an automatic preset computation which is object centered [12] and focused in form constancy, explaining the absence of visual cues concerning a viewpoint. The speed all participants showed, completing the task successfully, also suggests that those mental images are stored in long term memory and probably are used frequently for visual recognition purposes. In the drawing from observation learning the abuse of top-down processes can be very common among beginners, which can be explained by the fact that their previous knowledge of the scene or object might be addicted to object recognition, that fosters physical interaction, such as grabbing an object or crossing the street. Information derived from mere visual recognition is a very limited one, once it is propositional and object centered, and does not consider the observers’ location. The beginner’s paradox Questions rose as we looked for answers to the reported experiment, and this is why another experiment has been set. Just after the first one took place the same participants were asked to draw from observation, as accurately as they were seeing; a chair was set on top of a table, in a way that its seat was at the participants’ eye level. This time, participants were given 25 minutes to complete the chair drawing task. The drawings were made with graphite pencil 2B, in A3 drawing paper. They were also told not to use rubber and that the drawing should be as big as the paper’s surface allowed. The resulting drawings of this second task have shown many inconsistencies as far as the model’s view is concerned. The main inconsistency concerned the line directions representing profundity, coming to invert acute angles in a mirror way. There was no coherence in the use of intuitive perspective or intuitive axonometry and a mixing of the two was found. On one hand, participants coupled proximal sets of lines in parallelism, and, on the other hand, they coupled other line sets into a random convergence point. In almost drawings, the chair’s seat was represented as if one could see it slightly from above, even thought it could not be seen that way. This means that the draughtsmen did not adopt the viewpoint of their perceptual images. Comparing the first drawings to the second ones, it was found that the new viewpoints adopted were always up and matching or nearing the chair’s position adopted in the first experiment drawings. These results suggest that the drawings combined visual information from two different visual sources, the propositional image and the perceptual one. It is very likely that most of the difficulties in learning how to draw came from this phenomenon. Beginners may be attempting to draw exclusively from their propositional images, not the perceptual ones, as they form simultaneously in the mind, and this would also explain the reason why their drawings are always so poor in visual information content. In fact, when Luquet [14] asserts that children draw what they know, not what they see, he makes a very appropriate observation, given that children might be precisely in a constructing mental imagery phase, for visual recognition purposes. These two experiments have shown what we called the beginner’s paradox, that is to say, the inaugural dilemma beginners in drawing from observation have to overcome [16]. The argument implies that, during an observational drawing task, interactions occur between a top-down process which is meant to use a propositional mental image from visual long-term memory, and a bottom-up process, which is meant to use freshly perceived mental images. The beginner’s paradox starts when a dilemma arises unconsciously to the brain when facing the drawing task: a) Should the graphic image to be made come from the big store long term memory, that is to say, the mental image that successfully, automatically and almost effortlessly, arises to working memory when looking at an object and is daily used in object recognition? Or: b) Should the graphic image to be made come directly from the working memory, based on a multitude of heavy similar mental images, emerging for less than half a second each, coming from an ongoing perceptual process that requires hundreds of visualizations of the model and permanent interpretation of the visual data available, that is to say, a replication of the childhood’s process of discovering and making sense of the world? As van Sommers pointed out [18], the universal law most used within drawing is the economy of mental effort. As he stated, the bigger the planning and forecast effort a graphical operation demands, the more the process is avoided. Thus, untrained draughtsman facing the dilemma will repeatedly follow the first pathway, forming an initial learning phase of varying duration, depending on the individuals in which apparently there is a “refusal to see” and an exclusive production of propositional drawings that resemble children’s drawing. Although rarely, there might be cases where the reaction to this is a cognitive full blockage at the task, preventing the individual to draw at all. Drawing as means to develop cognitive processes: Perception and creativity Learning how to draw from observation implies the exercise of complex mental operations such as the analysis of incoming visual information and the selection of visual cues relevant to the production of a visual stimulus analogous to the one provided by the visual environment. These two require the previous Knowledge of the codified systems of geometry; once these are based on the ways we perceive the world [19]. It also, necessarily, implies a personal interpretation of the visual information to be carried out in the drawing. Lastly, it involves the use of strategic thinking [19] to implement the drawing construction, which aims to build an original image. The whole process also requires high skills in visual information management, once it deals simultaneously with three different sorts of mental images: The incoming model perception images, being renewed every split second; the propositional mental image(s), coming from long term memory; and, finally, the incoming drawing in process images, being renewed each seconds, and each time different from the previous one. This management is a truly intensive multitasking regime that uses the cognitive attention mechanism and demands a very robust use of the working memory. The benefits of this kind of cognitive training, which convenes a multiplicity of key cognitive functions in observational drawing practice, are, in fact, the development of visual intelligence and, ultimately, of intelligence as a whole, as Siza Vieira so insightfully stated. The cognitive functions underlying drawing skills produce a complexification and enlargement of the vision operative field. This enlargement mobilizes and trains the human cognitive processes the most complex: decision making, logical thinking and problem solving. Decision making is what the draughtsman does every time he adds a new graphic mark within the drawing implementation, because it has to fit the previous marks and also respect the properties of the model´s form. Some wrong steps can spoil the drawing’s coherence. Logical thinking is used in selecting and conducting a graphical strategy [19] for the progressive implementation of the drawing. This strategy must be constructed as to avoid predicable pit-falls and also fit the models’ properties and the draughtsman’s mood. Problem solving concerns the exercise of creativity which is crucial to the task, once each new drawing is a response to a representational problem, consisting in the creation of a new interpretative and personal image, which is analogous to our visual world and, therefore, can be shared. Drawing from observation refers, on one hand, to information concerning something external to the drawing and the individual and, on the other hand, it refers to the draughtsman himself, once his intense thinking process is somehow conveyed in to the drawing, resulting in a visual stimulus that expresses the human intelligence at work. References [1] Simmons, S. (1994) Philosophical Dimensions of Drawing Instruction in David Thistlewood (Ed.) Drawing Research and Development. UK. Longman. [2] Molina, J. (Ed.). (2002) El Manual de Dibujo – Estratégias de su enseñanza en el siglo xx. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. [3] De Duve, T. (2005). When Form Has Became Attitude – and beyond. In Z. Kocur& S Leung (Eds.), Theory in Contemporary art since 1985. London: Blakwell Publishing. 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