How does art affect the cognitive, affective and behavioral aspects of children?

Question

How does art affect the cognitive, affective and behavioral aspects of children?

Answer 1

Pictorial Art and Vision

Pictorial art attempts to capture the three-dimensional structure

of a scene—some chosen view of particular objects,

people, or a landscape. The artist’s goal is to convey a message

about the world around us, but we can also find in art a

message about the workings of the brain. Many look to art

for examples of pictorial depth cues—perspective, occlusion,

TEXTURE gradients, and so on—as these are the only

cues available for depth in pictures. DEPTH PERCEPTION

based on binocular disparity, vergence, and accommodation

is inappropriate for the depths depicted, and head movements

no longer provide new views of the scene. However,

pictorial cues are abundant in real scenes—that is why they

work in pictures—and there is no obvious benefit in studying

their effectiveness in art as opposed to their effectiveness

in natural scenes.

And yet pictorial art can tell us a great deal about vision

and the brain if we pay attention to the ways in which paintings

differ from the scenes they depict. First of all, we learn

that artists get away with a great deal—impossible colors,

inconsistent shading and shadows, inaccurate perspective,

the use of lines to stand for sharp discontinuities in depth or

brightness. These representational “errors” do not prevent

human observers from perceiving robust three-dimensional

forms. Art that captures the three-dimensional structure of

the world without merely recreating or copying it offers a revealing glimpse of the short cuts and economies of the

inner codes of vision. The nonveridicality of representation

in art is so commonplace that we seldom question the reason why it works.

A line drawing of a building or an elephant can convey

its 3-D structure very convincingly, but remember that

there are no lines in the real world corresponding to the

lines used in the drawings. The surface occlusions, folds, or creases that are represented by lines in drawings are

revealed by changes in, say, brightness or texture in the real

world, and these changes have one value extending on one

side and a different value on the other. This is not a line. It

is not obvious why lines should work at all. The effectiveness

of line drawings is not based simply on learned convention,

passed on through our culture. This point has been

controversial (Kennedy 1975; see Deregowski 1989, and its

following comments), but most recent evidence suggests

that line drawings are universally interpreted in the same

way—infants (Yonas and Arterberry 1994), stone-age

tribesmen (Kennedy and Ross 1975), and even monkeys

(Itakura 1994) appear to be capable of interpreting line

drawings as we do. Nor is it the case that the lines in line

drawings just trace the brightness discontinuities in the

image, because this type of representation is rendered

meaningless by the inclusion of cast shadow and pigment

contours. By a quirk of design or an economy of encoding,

lines may be directly activating the internal code for object

structure, but only object contours can be present in the

drawing for this shortcut to work. The shortcut, discovered

and exploited by artists, hints at the simplicity of the internal

code that underlies the vision of 3-D structures. This

code is both simpler than the 2 ½-D sketch of David MARR

and sparser than the compact, reversible codes (Olshausen

and Field 1996) that may reflect the workings of early areas

of VISUAL CORTEX. Both artists and brains have found out

which are the key contours necessary to represent the

essential structure of an object. By studying the nature of

lines used in line drawings, scientists too may eventually

join this group.

Another aspect as commonplace and as informative as

the effectiveness of lines is that pictures are flat and yet

they provide consistent, apparently 3-D interpretations

from a wide range of viewpoints. This is not only convenient

for the artist, but also prime evidence that our impressions

of a 3-D world are not supported by true, 3-D internal

representations. If we had real 3-D vision, the scene

depicted in a flat picture would have to distort grotesquely

in 3-D space as we moved about the picture. To the contrary,

however, objects in pictures seem reassuringly the

same as we change our vantage point (with some interesting

exceptions; see Gregory 1994). We don’t experience the

distortions probably because the visual system does not

generate a true 3-D representation of the object. It has some

qualities of three dimensions but it is far from Euclidean. It

may follow some other geometry, affine or nonmetric in

nature (Todd and Reichel 1989; Busey, Brady, and Cutting

1990). The effectiveness of flat images is of course a boon

to artists who do not have to worry about special vantage

points and to film makers who can have theaters with more

than one seat in them. It is also of great importance for

understanding the internal representations of objects and

space.

Finally, consider the enormous range of discrepancies

between light and shade in the world and their renditions

in art. When light and shade were introduced into art

about 2,200 years ago, it was through the use of local

techniques such as lightening a surface fold to make it

come forward (a Greek technique described by Pliny the

Elder; see Gombrich 1976 for a beautiful reinterpretation

of this ancient presentation of painting techniques). These

local techniques of shading, shadows, and highlights were

applied with little thought to making them all consistent

with a given light source—and yet they all work very well.

Even 500 years ago, when the geometry of perspective

was well understood, the geometry of light was still

ignored. The resulting errors in light and shadow would be

caught immediately by any analysis based on physical

optics, but pass unnoticed to human observers. Modern

artists with a full understanding of the physics of light and

shade available to them often still choose inconsistencies

in lighting either because it never matters much, or perhaps

because it looks better.

Evidently, we as observers do not reconstruct a light

source in order to recover the depth from shading and

shadow, we do not act as optical geometers in the way that

computer graphics programs can. We do not notice inconsistencies

across different portions of a painting but recover

depth cues locally. The message here is that in the real

world, the information is rich and redundant, so we do not

have to analyze the image much beyond a local region to

resolve any ambiguities. When faced with the sparser cues

of pictorial art, we do not adopt a larger region of analysis—

the local cues are meaningful, albeit inconsistent with cues

in other areas of the painting. To the advantage of the artist,

the inconsistencies go unnoticed. And again, like many

aspects of art, this discrepancy between the art and the scene

it depicts informs us about the brain within us as much as

about the world around us.

Answer 2

Art is a form that brings out the best in people like Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, it actually affects the brain waves so that a person mentally and spiritually performs better. Art is also a means it which a person can experience what is most noble in themselves.

It awakens and sharpens the senses and generally makes a person more aware in the moment.