Episode 7
Observational Drawing

INTRO：

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Most of us think of drawing as a creative skill or just a hobby，but what if learning to draw could also change the way we see and think?

In this episode of Brain Matters, I talk with Dr. Masha Vodyanyk about observational drawing, visual attention, and what her research suggests about how drawing may shape our perception.

 

Vivian: Okay, so to start, could you introduce yourself to our audience and share a little bit about the work you're currently working on?

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Masha:  My name is Masha Vodyanyk and I recently got my Ph.D at Northwestern University. I actually started my educational journey back at University of Madison where I studied neuroscience and art as an undergrad maybe came very interested in neuroplasticity, how the brain can change itself through different experiences and I was able to combine that with my interest in the art and how engaging in the arts can change our brains, so I went on to study this. For my Ph.D and then throughout my Ph.D, I conducted a series of different studies I did. Four different studies that we're all focused on learning to draw understanding the best ways to develop observational and drawing skills, and then also looking at the connection between drawing skills and cognition the underlying cognitive mechanisms of observational drawing.

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Vivian: Okay, so many teenagers may think that drawing is just a hobby or for us to take people only but drivers only mean creating beautiful artwork. Could you explain what observational drying is and like why it has to come at the top of the research.

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Masha: Yeah, observational drawing is essentially drawing what you are looking at kind of to the best of your abilities is actually as possible and this is one of the earliest skills that's usually typically taught in art school, so, or different degrees. So I was also learning observation drawing like when I was an undergrad and one of the kind of key things about drawing is that observational drawing specifically is that it can be very easily defined and very easily quantified, so that's one of the main reasons that it became, kind of a popular topic of study with researchers. So I would say observational drawing has gained interest in the research fields, kind of over the last twenty thirty years because artists that became researchers and kind of the intersection research in art people have noticed that as people develop drawing skills as they personally develop drawing skills the way that they look at the world has started to change, so people pay attention to different things. So like I said, the last one year so years researchers have started to quantify drawing skills to look to see, so how well does somebody draw? How can we measure that? And then also looking at the connection to different cognitive abilities. So like our visual perception, our visual attention, our visual memory, these different visual spatial domains of cognition, looking at how they relate to observational drawing skills has really been one of the key aspects of research, but one area where the research hasn't really gone yet where I'm interested. What I'm interested in is how developing drawing skills can actually, then potentially change our cognition because a lot of these studies look at, say art students, so it's not very clear whether they already had high visual spatial processing and that's why they may be going to the arts or whether actually, developing drug skills can change cognition. So that's where the field is currently going, and that's what myself and quite a few other researchers are interested in.

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Vivian: So then have you found through your studies that observational drawing can change the world the way that we see the world?

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Masha: Yeah, through a few different studies, I have found some early evidence that this is the case. So I guess two studies in particular that I've done that I think highlight this really nicely is I did a study with undergraduate students where it was just a single session of teaching them specific drawing techniques. So they had half an hour and we taught them kind of three key drawing techniques that people typically learn when they're learning observational drawing and then afterwards we asked them a set of questions about their training experience and then we also gave them a set of cognitive tasks before and after, and on the cognitive tasks, we actually did not really see any changes that were not related to just like practicing the task more because they did those tasks about forty minutes apart so they still kind of had them in their mind and they got better at them just through practicing them. So, to see actual changes transfer to performance on different cognitive tasks that usually takes a little bit more time and larger sample sizes, but we did find was first of all, there were some changes in people's eye movements, so how they were looking at visual information change, as a result of the drawing training, they were making shorter eye movements, they were making quicker eye movements, they were looking around the scene more, but then also in the open-ended response questions, we did find that people, so we asked people, what do you think this type of training might be useful for? Did you find any changes? In your perception, while we were doing the training and there are people did report that they found that they were looking at spatial information differently, they found that their perception was in hand. So this was more kind of a self report, but that really is where more of the long term changes start is from people perceiving one of these short term changes. So this was like I said, a study with undergrads that was a bit shorter and then I also did a study with older adults that was a longer scale, but a shorter a smaller sample size, this was around fifteen participants who developed observation drawing skills over the course of eight weeks, and this was also kind of a pre tel's training process design, where at the post house we had them well, both of the pre and the post test they did a set of cognitive tasks and they have a set of questionnaires. And in the study, we found that participants reported enhanced feelings of mindfulness through observational drawing, so they started to notice things differently in their environment. They started to interact with the world differently, as a result of the training and since the study was long also as they were doing the training, we had them fill out daily logs of their training progress. And in those logs, first of all, they submitted their drawings, so we got to see how the different techniques develop their drawing skills, sharpen their perceptual skills, but then also throughout this training period, people were reporting starting to look at things differently, even outside of when they were drawing. So, kind of overall in the studies we did find that there is evidence that as people develop driving skills, the way that they look at things starts to change. Especially this mindfulness component, but then to really see this transfer to standard cognitive laboratory tasks, this is something that does require larger sample sizes, a longer training, so really my research for my Ph.D has been focused on understanding why are the cognitive outcomes that might change is a result of this training and then also, I'm kind of defining the best ways to train people's drawing skills in a way that engages their cognition directly.

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Vivian: Just out of curiosity then like is the longitudinal study that you're looking for like how long would it be?

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Masha: Yeah, it's not super clear. There's not exactly a correct answer for that, a lot of my work also comes from the cognitive training field. So, I'm cognitive training is a field where it comes from this idea of neuroplasticity that when we engage our brains. We are sharpening different cognitive processes, so there's different computerized cognitive training games have been developed at training things like our attention and our memory. So what I've done in my own work was kind of make like art space cognitive training, so people will learn these different techniques, but then they'll also explicitly practice different cognitive domains through these techniques. So we'll ask them to like pay attention to different parts of the scene, kind of things like that so we try to it sounds game of science. Make it more like cognitive training, but I'm kind of going back to your question. In the fields of cognitive training,There hasn't really been an exact answer of how much training somebody needs, because it depends on a variety of different factors, but from what I understand maybe the minimum is like ten hours of practice total, I'm getting closer to twenty hours of practice total is definitely better. So if you think about say twenty hours of practice with two hours a week, that's around ten weeks of training, so it depends on a variety of different factors, but even six to eight weeks could be enough to potentially find some kind of changes potentially even four weeks, depending on how frequently and how deliberately somebody's practice saying.

 

Vivian: Going back to what you said earlier about how observational drawing can be easily defined or measured. What do you mean by that? When participants draw better, does it just mean that their drawing looks more like what they’re observing? And what would be the kind of intended result or benefit of improved drawing, for example, what would result in improved or enhanced cognitive domains?

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Masha: Yeah, so there'sSome different ways that we can measure people's observation and drawing skills. What's typically done in research is we'll give people usually a photograph of a still life of a scene or sometimes people will draw something from real life and then what we can do is we can quantify the accuracy of this drawing through different methods. So in my own work I've quantified. People shrine accuracy through, for example, different rubrics where we'll define different categories like on the distortion of the objects, the orientation of the different lines, the size and the location relative to other objects to them. What you do is you have a set of readers and they assign each of the objects a score on these categories, say from zero to two and then you can sum all these scores together. You can average across raiders, and then you can get a final score of drawing an accuracy, and you can imagine that is a little bit time consuming. So that's one of the limitations people are interested in say automating the scoring, especially now with all of these different like artificial network models that can process visual information.

 

That's one of the ways that the field is going, but then there's also other ways of measuring people's drawing accuracy. That is more I guess I would call it a rubrics, a more subjective it kind of depends on the person who's reading it, and their background knowledge. So for example, it's been shown that people who have a drawing experience, they tend to write things more strict than people who don't have drawing experience. So there's kind of all these different factors that can play a role in the final rating, but then there's other more objective measures and I'm one that I've implemented in my own work is measuring in go accuracy so you can imagine in a scene. And there's both angles within objects, then there's angles kind of between objects where objects intersect. And one thing that artists are a lot better at the non artic ts is drawing what is called for shortening so for shortening is this idea, like when we look at a table, looking at a kind of an eye level, the top of the table is going to look really flat, but we know that's say the table is like a circle or a square if we're looking at it from above. So what a non artist will often do is draw the table kind of as more of a bird's eye view, so they'll draw it as more of like a square. Whereas somebody who's a more trained in art is going to draw it more as kind of like a skinny diamond shape, so we can do is we can measure. This angle of the table, and then what you can do is you can measure, say like to add key points on the reference photograph that they're drawing, and then you can measure those time angles on their drawing, and then you can calculate this like angle error. And then you can average those angle errors into kind of like a final score of angle accuracy. So the less error they have, the smaller the angle error will be, the larger the angle error, you know the worst kind of drawing is.

 

So what I did in my own studies was we had, I had one study that I did where this was a correlational study where we surveyed expert visual artists and then as a comparison group we had writers and we had everybody do a drawing task and we had everybody do a set of cognitive. There's just spatial reasoning type of tasks that involve mentally visualizing information mentally transforming it. And we score pupils drawing accuracy using this rubric approach and this angular accuracy approach. And first we found that scoring people's accuracy through both of these types of methods does lead to kind of similar scores of accuracy, but then also what we found was that the higher people’s accuracy was on these tasks, the higher on these drawing tasks, the higher their performance on the cognitive measures was as well. So, this is something that is generally been found in other studies as well is the higher people's drawing skills are the higher their performance on the cognitive measures, but it also, depends a little bit on kind of a cross study, so people tend to find that maybe these relationships are stronger and people who have visual art expertise.

 

So if you're just giving the measures to people who don't really have much expertise then maybe the correlations won't be strong. As strong or, it might also depend on the drawing tasks that people are dealing so in one of my studies like the one with the undergrads that I talked about where we did the cognitive training. The drawing training and then looking at the impacts on cognition there we found that the correlation to the cognitive measures was a lot stronger in a task that was from life and a little bit more difficult, whereas the correlations were quite weaker with a more simple task of drawing from a photograph so there's a few different factors, but generally, what we find is the higher people's drawing accuracy, the higher their cognition. So then from there the interest is if we develop people's drawing skills.What we find is people's drawing accuracy does get better, so even in that short thirty minute drawing session, we found that people that did that drawing training, their drawing accuracy got better as measured by the rubric approach that I talked about earlier I also found in the older adult study, but then we haven't really been able to look at whether if somebody's trying accuracy got better so like the ideas, if somebody's trying to accuracy got more better than maybe their performance on the cognitive task, I'm more better as well so that could be something that would be interesting to explore in the future. 

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OUTRO:

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Observational drawing may not be just a hobby or about making the most hyperrealistic drawing possible. It can help us slow down, notice more, and see our surroundings through a different lens. In the next episode, we’ll look at whether drawing can also help with something many students struggle with: attention and focus.

 

See you next time on Brain Matters.