The Science of Learning and the Cultivation of the Arts.

National Science Foundation: The Final Report

Main Outcomes from the Workshop (p.4)

Evaluation of the Current Status

The Workshop was motivated by the current expansion of interest in the science of learning and the expanded possibilities of conceptual interrelationships offered by training and exposure to the arts. As a high priority for the national interest, the difficult task of understanding and effectively enhancing learning across disciplines, ages and cultural specificities was thought to be particularly benefited by training in and even exposure to the arts.

Both the workshop presentations and discussions demonstrated how contemporary research is beginning to explore new neuroscientific hypotheses concerning the effects of learning in activities (such as musical performance, drawing, visual aesthetics, and dance) on learning in non-artistic domains. For example, early evidence suggests that experience in the arts may facilitate creative thinking and effective problem solving across a broad range of domains, and plausible neural underpinnings are beginning to be identified.

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Neuroscience research demonstrates that the visual areas of the brain are divided into two distinct pathways. The dorsal, or spatial, and ventral, or object pathways. The object pathway  runs from occipital lobe to inferior temporal lobe, processing visual appearances of objects in terms of color, detail, shape, and size. The spatial pathway runs from occipital lobe to posterior parietal lobe, processing spatial attributes such as location, movement, spatial transformations  and spatial relations.

 

Based on behavioral and neuroscience evidence, there has been formulated a theoretical framework of individual differences in visual imagery, suggesting that visualization ability is not a single undifferentiated construct, but rather is divided into two main dimensions: object and spatial, and that the spatial dimension is further divided into allocentric and egocentric dimensions. All these visualization abilities underlie success at different complex, real-world tasks, and predict specialization in different professional and academic domains.

 Source: http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/?tag=neural-underpinnings

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MUSIC

Results were presented revealing that musical experience and short-term auditory training can enhance subcortical representation of the acoustic elements known to be important for reading and speech encoding, and that such learning outcomes can be objectively assessed. The presenters also described neuroimaging support for the idea that there exists a frontal brain region that processes the general property of ‘structure’, when that structure is conveyed over time (i.e., the property in common across musical structure, language structure or the visual organization of words conveyed through American Sign Language). Thus, experience with musical structure can be expected to enhance the learning of language structure. Moreover, long-term musical experience on development is known to last for years and it is possible that such experience may provide protective effects against aging and the disruptive effects of hearing loss.

DANCE

Dance integrates the rhythmicity of music and the representational capacity of language. Neuroimaging studies of dance were presented that have examined brain areas involved in both the production and perception of dance. Perception studies have evaluated neural “expertise effects”, demonstrating brain activations that occur preferentially in people who are competent to perform the dance movements. Neuroscientific evidence was presented suggesting that music and dance may activate two parts of the same motor-action-imitation system through mirror neurons. Music and dance also evoke emotions and stimulate visual images that expand the scope of the material being learned by maintaining attention and allowing a higher level of memory retention.

VISUAL ARTS

Visual art learning is reliant on a complex system of perceptual, higher cognitive and motor functions, suggesting a shared neural substrate and strong potential for cross-cognitive
transfer in learning and creativity. For instance, recent neuroimaging studies have started to reveal that the process of drawing shares cortical processing areas with many specific cognitive processes, such as those involved in writing, access to the semantic system, naming, imagery, constructional abilities and the ability to estimate precise spatial relations. A case study was discussed that has revealed significant processing differences between the brains of a professional artist and a novice during drawing in the scanner; the comparative analysis of the activation patterns suggests a more effective network of cognitive processing for the brain of the artist. Neuroanatomical underpinnings of visual art production and appreciation from observations of brain damage in established artists were described, as well as the relationship between art and other communicative displays by biological organisms, and the role that beauty plays in art.

PRINCIPLES OF VISUAL NEUROSCIENCE

Speakers introduced some of the principles of visual neuroscience and showed how artists have implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) taken advantage of these principles in developing works of visual art. On that basis, a specific undergraduate syllabus was proposed, with the goal not only to advance an understanding of the neural systems that underlie vision but also to cultivate observational skills and critical thinking. It was emphasized that more sophisticated and contemporary models are needed of what art is, models that should also be based on the tools of psychology and psychoanalysis. Art should be regarded as a cognitive process in which artists engage the most perplexing issues in present experience and try to find a way of symbolizing them visually so that they can bring coherence to their experience.

CONCLUSION

In consequence, the definition of art is constantly changing in relation to its time. Understanding how we symbolize our experience, how we use symbolic form to organize our thinking processes, and what are the neuroanatomical corollaries to these processes, will have obvious implications for learning. From pre-historical times, visual art has been a form of communication deeply embedded inhuman nature. The participants discussed how compositional universals govern the design of visual artworks across ages and cultures, and how the act of art experience and appreciation in the “receiver” also has the power of cross-cognitive effect during any time point in individual development. These findings have implications not only for biomedical sciences, but also for learning, pedagogical principles and general social and educational policies.