The Art of Seeing: How Does Artistic Visual Experience Modulate Perceptual Reorganization Abilities?

Abstract

This thesis employs a tripartite strategy to investigate the effect of artistic expertise on visual perception. Participants engaged in a sequence of perceptual tasks ranging from simple (line drawing recognition) to complex (perceptual reorganization of two-tone images). Additionally, subjects (n = 87) belonged to one of three experimental groups: professional artist participants, professional art historian participants, and control participants. The artist participants alone exhibited significantly enhanced abilities for a complex visual task: perceptual reorganization. Thus, artists displayed improved accuracy levels for the identification of un-cued images that had been conceptually primed. The interpretation of these results is twofold: firstly, visual abilities lie on a continuum mediated by experience, albeit only for high-level perceptual tasks. Specifically, we demonstrated that direct experience creating visual art significantly improves perceptual reorganization abilities. Keywords: perceptual reorganization, neuroaesthetics, visual literacy, empirical aesthetics, perceptual variability