Visual and Motor Processing in Visual Artists: Implications for Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms

Expert visual artists differ from nonartists in their patterns of encoding to-be-rendered stimuli, which has implications for cognitive processing changes in experts generally. Artists' motor processing is poorly understood. It also remains unclear if artists' altered visual processing transfers to visual perception with goals other than rendering. Task I examined eye- and hand-movement patterns found in artists and nonartists when rendering familiar and novel stimuli. Task 2 examined performance in a recognition task that utilized novel stimuli. The results suggest that artists possess both domain-specific and domain-independent advantages, in that they have more efficient visual encoding and motor output patterns than nonartists when rendering, as well as superior visual encoding when the synergistic benefit of such a domain-relevant goal is taken away. The results of a concurrent analysis suggest a link between the advantage and schizotypy, associated with a neural profile of attenuated left prefrontal activation and increased bilateral prefrontal activation as a compensatory mechanism. Implications for creativity are discussed.