Skilled Drawing as a “Non-Artificial” and Thus Transferable Domain of Expertise

How are trained visual artists able to create convincing realistic renderings of the visible world? How can the expertise of artists be characterized? Here I argue that expertise in art differs materially from that in chess, physics, or other ‘classical’ domains that have been examined. In principle, a good artist can draw even novel objects convincingly – in contrast to the fragile, pattern-driven dynamic undergirding expertise in most domains, where performance typically plummets in unfamiliar situations. I characterize the expert knowledge base of a domain like chess as ‘artificial’ – in that chess is an arbitrary, invented game. In contrast, the knowledge enabling accurate realistic drawing is far from artificial, since artists creating representational depictions must solve precisely the same problems that the visual system does routinely. These include figure-ground segregation, object segmentation, understanding objects’ three-dimensional forms and spatial positions, highlighting particular features to facilitate object recognition, etc.

Many of the processes undergirding high-level drawing performance can be subsumed under the umbrella of appropriate attentional modulation – particularly in an artist’s ability to accurately extract the information necessary for a rendering and to deploy marks appropriately, to induce a proper percept in viewers. My colleagues and I have argued that the modulation of attention can derive from both schematic, pattern-driven knowledge (à la Gombrich’s Art and Illusion) as well as motor priming resulting from the proceduralization of that knowledge over time. Recently, we have also considered the possibility that differences in some fundamental parameters of the visual system may distinguish artists from non-artists, for instance, in differential attentional capacities or in contrast sensitivity at particular spatial frequencies (on the latter point, research by Bavelier and colleagues on videogame players suggests that contrast sensitivity may be far more malleable than previously thought.) These points, characterizing visual art as a ‘non-artificial’ domain of expertise, suggests that transfer from drawing to other domains, particularly those involving certain kinds of perceptual analysis, may be quite viable and powerful – potentially operating at both the levels of cognitive and attentional processes, as well as more general parameters of the visual system.