Symposium

Symposium 2: Beyond the Button Press: Studying the Mind Through Drawings
Friday, November 5, 1:30 - 3:30 PM CT

Chairs: J. Brendan Ritchie (National Institutes of Health) and Benjamin van Buren (The New School)
Researchers often study visual cognition by asking participants to view stimuli and press keys on a computer keyboard. By contrast, in this symposium, we highlight recent discoveries which have been made possible by considering a higher-dimensional measure — namely, drawings. By collecting drawings from study participants, our speakers have found new answers to questions such as, “What do we remember about a visual scene?”, “How is visual input segmented into discrete objects and events?”, “How do different communicative purposes determine the amount of abstraction used in a drawing?”, and “What are the perceptual and cognitive differences that distinguish a drawing expert from a non-expert?” This symposium is a celebration of methodological innovation in behavioral research. Thus, in addition to discussing our findings, we will provide practical advice for those interested in using drawings to study the mind. We will also discuss the theoretical challenges and opportunities that arise from incorporating cultural artifacts into basic research on human perception and cognition.

Drawing Out Our Visual Memories 

Presenter: Wilma A. Bainbridge (University of Chicago)
In spite of the clear richness of our visual memories, there are still many open questions about the specific content underlying their mental representations. Traditionally, verbal recall or visual recognition tasks have tried to quantify these memories, but with limited resolution. In a series of recent studies, we have developed new ways to use drawing as a form of visual free recall, combined with large-scale crowd-sourced scoring to objectively quantify these drawings. These new methods allow us to observe the object details, spatial details, and false memories within a mental representation. In this talk, I will present what drawings have shown us about visual memory for scenes, including recent findings characterizing aphantasia (a lack of visual imagery). I will also provide advice on how to conduct your own online rapid drawing experiments, and ideas for how these tools could be extended to other topics.

Visual Content and Social Context Jointly Determine Pictorial Meaning

Presenter: Judith Fan (University of California, San Diego)
Drawing is a versatile technique for visual communication, ranging from photorealistic renderings to schematic diagrams consisting entirely of symbols. How does a medium spanning such a broad range of appearances reliably convey meaning? A natural possibility is that drawings derive meaning from both their visual properties as well as shared knowledge between people who use them to communicate. In this talk, I’ll describe two studies exploring this possibility using drawing-based communication games. In the first study, we investigated how semantic context affects what information people consider relevant to include in their drawings; in the second, we investigated the consequences of accumulating shared knowledge via extended communication on how people depicted the same object over time. Taken together, our findings show that both visual information and social context are crucial for determining how drawings derive referential meaning during visual communication, and suggest that a critical factor affecting the balance between the two may be the type and amount of shared knowledge between communicators.

Drawing as a Window onto Perceptual Expertise 

Presenter: Rebecca Chamberlain (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Do artists see the world differently? One of the most ecologically valid ways of measuring perceptual differences in artists is to study the act of art making itself. By measuring the way in which individuals draw and their eye movements while doing so, across two studies we have been able to show that drawing expertise is coupled with a shift to more global attentional strategies. Artists draw more global perceptual features first and demonstrate more global-to-local saccades and fixations while drawing, but not while free-viewing. Such research illuminates the perceptual changes artists undergo as they learn how to see by learning how to draw, and provides clues to the domain-specificity of artistic expertise.

When Scenes Look Like Materials: Rene Magritte's Reversible Figure-Ground Motif 

Presenter: J. Brendan Ritchie (National Institutes of Health)
We draw attention to a frequent motif in the work of the Belgian surrealist Rene´ Magritte (1898-1967). In the motif, a scene is depicted that contains a silhouette, which itself contains another depicted scene. The silhouette is bistable, appearing either as a figural region whose positive space is covered, or filled, with the interior scene texture, or as a ground region providing a window onto a more distant scene. We call this the ‘reversible figure-ground motif’. Because the stimulus does not change when our percept changes, the motif’s appearance at any particular moment cannot be explained by its local or global image statistics. Instead principles of perceptual organization, and in particular image segmentation and figure-ground assignment, appear crucial for determining whether the interior of the silhouette is processed as a material vs. a scene — which in turn supports a fundamental role for visual segmentation processes in material and scene perception more generally. From this, we conclude that image-based models are fundamentally limited in their ability to describe human scene and material perception.

What Do Visual Narratives Teach Us about Psychological Event Representations? 

Presenter: Benjamin van Buren (The New School)
We experience the world not as a continuous stream of sensory data, but rather as a series of discrete events. Often, this is studied by asking subjects to view movies, and to mark moments that they judge to be ‘event boundaries’. This assumes that event representations are contiguous, with each passing moment captured in one representation or another. However, glancing at any comic strip suggests that a sequence of images depicting temporally disconnected moments can convey a rich narrative, and that event representations may thus omit stretches of time. In an initial experiment, we asked comic artists to draw comic versions of movies, and a second group of subjects indicated which parts of the movie each panel represented. This confirmed that comics are a sparse form of event representation, omitting on average 33% of movies. In a second experiment, we modified the classical 'boundary marking’ task, asking subjects to mark a movie timeline to indicate not the boundaries between events, but rather each event’s start and end frames. When allowed to mark events in this way, subjects omitted large portions of each movie from any event. We conclude that psychological event representations, like comics, are discontiguous in nature.

Drawing for Communication: Simplification and Complication as Contextually Dependent Adaptive Strategies

Presenter: Eline Van Geert (KU Leuven) 
The Gestalt psychologists posited that we will always organize our visual input in the best way possible. Both the removal of unnecessary details (simplification) and the exaggeration of distinctive features (complication) can contribute to reach a better organization. When will a feature be simplified or complicated, however? We investigated whether the importance of a feature for discrimination influences which organizational tendency occurs. We simultaneously presented participants with four figures composed of simple geometrical shapes, and asked them to reconstruct one of these figures in such a way that another participant would be able to recognize the target figure amongst the alternatives. The four figures differed either quantitatively or qualitatively (close or far context). In case of quantitative differences, two feature dimensions were varied, with one manifesting a wider range of variability across the alternatives than the other. As expected, the results indicate that complication occurred more often for the feature exhibiting more variability and in the close context, than for the feature exhibiting a smaller range of variability or in the far context.