
Rebecca ChamberlainGoldsmiths University of London · Department of Psychology
Rebecca Chamberlain
PhD
About
80
Publications
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Introduction
I am a reader in psychology, exploring the psychological and neuroscientific basis of artistic perception and production
I am director of the MSc in Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics and Creativity at Goldsmiths (https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/msc-psychology-arts-neuroaesthetics-creativity/) .
Additional affiliations
January 2017 - present
November 2013 - December 2016
October 2010 - October 2013
Publications
Publications (80)
A dominant theory of embodied aesthetic experience (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 197) posits that the appreciation of visual art is linked to the artist's movements when creating the artwork, yet a direct link between the kinematics of drawing actions and the aesthetics of drawing outcomes has not been experimentally...
In the past two decades, 'slow looking' has emerged as an engaging art-viewing approach used by museums around the world as part of their in-person and online programming, but there has been little empirical inquiry into the precise effects of the practice. This study represents the first such attempt, exploring reported impacts of slow looking wit...
Art is capable of evoking empathetic and aesthetic responses in the presence of negative content like pain and suffering. The impact that artistic modes of depiction have on aesthetic and empathetic responses to painful stimuli has not been fully explored. In this study, participants viewed neutral and painful stimuli depicting humans with visible...
Touch plays a crucial role for humans. Despite its centrality in sensory experiences, the field of haptic aesthetics is underexplored. So far, existing research has revealed that preferences in the haptic domain are related to stimulus properties and the Gestalt laws of grouping. Additionally, haptic aesthetics is influenced by top-down processes,...
Specific learning and attention difficulties are often first identified in childhood, but they can cause lifelong academic and occupational challenges. We explored the prevalence of these difficulties and the representation of sex and ethnicity amongst all first-year students in UK higher education across 12 years—almost 5.7 million students—and co...
As psychological research embraces more naturalistic questions and large-scale analytic methods, drawing has emerged as an exciting tool for studying cognition. Drawing provides rich information about how we view the world, ranging from largely veridical perceptual representations to abstracted meta-cognitive representations. Drawing also requires...
Museums are inherently social spaces. Groups account for the majority of museum visits as compared to individual viewers (Hein, 2002). And yet, the impact of viewing artworks alongside others has remained a largely unexplored realm of empirical aesthetics. This research presents the first experimental, large-scale study to systematically investigat...
This book, of which this chapter is a part, is about people who changed the ways in which they related to being visually creative or made art. Maybe they suddenly found themselves with a heightened interest in producing artworks, ramping up, greatly, their artistic production. Maybe they found themselves spontaneously able to see or think in novel...
For a book devoted to the overlap of visual art making and creativity with the putatively changing brain, it makes sense to talk about what we know of the typical artist and the artistic brain. What are the regions of interest—in fact, are there any—that can be connected to the specific production of art? Are there any particular areas or neurobiol...
Experiences with visual art are complex, multi-faceted, contextually dependent phenomena. They integrate a variety of personal and situational factors, as well as object and event-related attributes. Given the complex behavioural nature of visual art experiences, it is with good reason that the neural basis of such phenomena has been challenging to...
In the past two decades, ‘slow looking’ has emerged as an effective learning paradigm for improving art viewing skills, but there has been little empirical inquiry into the precise effects of the practice. This study represents the first such attempt, exploring reported impacts of slow looking within a virtual context. Specifically, the study exami...
Aesthetic chills, broadly defined as a somatic marker of peak emotional-hedonic responses, are experienced by individuals across a variety of human cultures. Yet individuals vary widely in the propensity of feeling them. These individual differences have been studied in relation to demographics, personality, and neurobiological and physiological fa...
The field of empirical aesthetics sets out to understand and predict our aesthetic preferences (Palmer et al., Annual Review of Psychology 64(1):77–107, 2013). Its history dates back to the birth of visual psychophysics and the work of Gustav Fechner (Vorschule der aesthetik (Vol. 1). Brietkopf & Härtel, 1876), while multiple models of aesthetic ex...
The attentional demands of drawing require both local processing of an object’s details and global processing of its overall structure. In this study, we examined the extent to which artists have superior local and global processing skills, how these skills relate to artists’ ability to draw realistically and to autistic-related traits, and whether...
Aesthetic chills, broadly defined as a somatic marker of peak emotional-hedonic responses, are experienced by individuals across a variety of human cultures. Yet individuals vary widely in the propensity of feeling them. These individual differences have been studied in relation to demographics, personality, and neurobiological and physiological fa...
Previous research has shown that artists employ flexible attentional strategies during offline perceptual tasks (Chamberlain et al., 2018; Chamberlain & Wagemans, 2015). The current study explored visual processing online, by tracking the eye movements of artists and non-artists (n=65) while they produced representational drawings of photographic s...
Slow looking is an increasingly prevalent strategy for enhancing visitor engagement in the gallery, yet there is little research to show why looking at artworks for longer should be beneficial. The curator of a recent exhibition of Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Gallery in London encouraged viewers to look slowly in order to enrich their experience of...
Graffiti art is a controversial art form, and as such there has been little empirical work assessing its aesthetic value. A recent study examined image statistical properties of text-based artwork and revealed that images of text contain less global structure relative to fine detail compared to artworks. However, previous research did not include g...
Aesthetic chills, broadly defined as a marker of bodily mixed emotional-hedonic responses from aesthetic phenomena, are universally shared yet diversified phenomena that encompass every human culture. However, while individual differences in aesthetic chills are related to behavioral, personality, functional and structural brain individual differen...
A growing body of research has been attempting to examine the unique perceptual processing of visual artists, such as flexible visual attention, across diverse disciplines. Using eye movements while artists and novices produce representational drawings, the current study aims to examine whether flexibility of visual processing systematically predic...
Aesthetic chills are an established measure for peaks of mixed emotional-hedonic responses to aesthetic phenomena that encompass behavioral, physiological and neurobiological individual differences. We aimed to inspect whether such differences encompass genomic differences too. We used the twin method on a large sample of twin data (N = 8733 pairs)...
A growing body of correlational research has revealed systematic relationships between various aspects of visuospatial processing and representational drawing ability. However, very few studies have sought to examine the longitudinal development of the relation between drawing and visuospatial ability. The current investigation explored change in d...
The ability to draw is a uniquely human activity, ubiquitous in childhood but seldom performed at expert levels in adulthood. Relative to other domains of expertise (chess, music, sport), drawing is understudied, and yet because it is a universal developmental ability mastered by so few, it provides an ideal test bed for competing theories of exper...
Since its initial development, the embedded figures test (EFT) has been used extensively to measure local–global perceptual style. However, little is known about the perceptual factors that influence target detection. The current study aimed to investigate disembedding in children with and without ASD, aged 8–15 years, using the newly developed, st...
Conflicting empirical and theoretical accounts suggest that dyslexia is associated with either average, enhanced, or impoverished high‐level visuospatial processing relative to controls. Such heterogeneous results could be due to the presence of wider variability in dyslexic samples, which is unlikely to be identified at the single study level, due...
Performance on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) has been interpreted as a reflection of local/global perceptual style, weak central coherence and/or field independence, as well as a measure of intelligence and executive function. The variable ways in which EFT findings have been interpreted demonstrate that the construct validity of this measure is...
Script to analyze data of study 1
Script to analyze data of study 2
Script to analyze reliability of measures of switching task used in study 2
Script to calculate reliability of L-EFT
Script to analyze data of study 3
Script to analyze reliability of measures in study 1
Script to calculate reliability of the flanker task used in study 2
The question of whether and how visual artists see the world differently than non-artists has
long engaged researchers and scholars in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Yet as evidence
regarding this issue accumulates, it has become clear that the answers to these questions are
by no means straightforward. With a view to advancing ongoing debate...
We use the example of art-derived solace to discuss a broader mechanism by which negative affect is instrumental in creating positive appreciation of artworks. Based on the theory of predictive processing, we argue that increasing attunement or reduction of prediction errors, which implies increasing validation of the agent(‘s models), is experienc...
As artificial intelligence (AI) technology increasingly becomes a feature of everyday life, it is important to understand how creative acts, regarded as uniquely human, can be valued if produced by a machine. The current studies sought to investigate how observers respond to works of visual art created either by humans or by computers. Study 1 test...
This paper reports on a series of drawing workshops held at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, which tested an original pedagogical strategy designed to help dyslexic and/or dyspraxic art and design students who had reported difficulties with their abilities to make accurate representational drawings. A group of non-dyslexic/dyspraxic RCA stud...
Artists often report that seeing familiar stimuli in novel and interesting ways plays a role in visual art creation. However, the attentional mechanisms which underpin this ability have yet to be fully investigated. More specifically, it is unclear whether the ability to reinterpret visual stimuli in novel and interesting ways is facilitated by end...
A large body of research reports individual differences in local and global visual processing in relation to expertise, culture and psychopathology. However, recent research has suggested that various different measures of local-global processing are not strongly associated with one another, calling its construct validity into question. The current...
Background
The Embedded Figures Test (EFT, developed by Witkin and colleagues (1971)) has been used extensively in research on individual differences, particularly in the study of autism spectrum disorder. The EFT was originally conceptualized as a measure of field (in)dependence, but in recent years performance on the EFT has been interpreted as a...
Description of variables in raw data files
Poster presented at VSS 2016
The difficulty adults find in drawing objects or scenes from real life is puzzling, assuming that there are few gross individual differences in the phenomenology of visual scenes and in fine motor control in the neurologically healthy population. A review of research concerning the perceptual, motoric and memorial correlates of drawing ability was...
Based on Gestalt psychological work on perceptual organization (Gottschaldt, 1926, 1929), Witkin (1950) developed the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) where he asked participants to find a target stimulus (e.g., a triangle) within a complex figure which was designed to camouflage the target. Since then, several different EFT versions have been developed...
The generation of genuinely creative works of art could be considered as the final frontier in artificial intelligence (AI). Several AI research groups are pursuing this by programming algorithms which generate works in various media and styles. The ultimate test of success for such a machine artist would be to convince the onlooker that it was gen...
Research suggests that expertise typically is acquired as a result of deliberate practice and a flexible approach to strategies for learning. Representational drawing is a complex skill which underpins performance in many branches of the visual arts and has the characteristics of other domains of expertise. It is therefore likely that approaches to...
In 1943 Theron Cain studied art students’ ability to draw a series of simple two-dimensional shapes, and found this ability to be correlated with formal drawing assessments at art school. This provided evidence that some aspects of drawing ability could be quantified, and that performance on simple drawing tasks could predict higher level attainmen...
Structural brain differences in relation to expertise have been demonstrated in a number of domains including visual perception, spatial navigation, complex motor skills and musical ability. However no studies have assessed the structural differences associated with representational skills in visual art. As training artists are inclined to be a het...
Structural brain differences in relation to expertise have been demonstrated in a number of domains including visual perception, spatial navigation, complex motor skills and musical ability. However no studies have assessed the structural differences associated with representational skills in visual art. As training artists are inclined to be a het...
How do our abilities to process number and other continuous quantities such as time and space relate to each other? Recent evidence suggests that these abilities share common magnitude processing and neural resources, although other findings also highlight the role of dimension-specific processes. To further characterize the relation between number...
The present thesis describes an exploration of cognitive, perceptual and neuroscientific foundations of representational drawing. To motivate experimental hypotheses, an initial qualitative study of artists’ attitudes and approaches to drawing was conducted. Themes from the qualitative data, predominantly concerning the relationship between percept...
Individuals with drawing talent have previously been shown to exhibit enhanced local visual processing ability. The aim of the current study was to assess whether local processing biases associated with drawing ability result from a reduced ability to cohere local stimuli into global forms, or an increased ability to disregard global aspects of an...
Background / Purpose:
To explore the potential link between visual memory and drawing ability.
Main conclusion:
Visual long-term memory and drawing ability appear to be correlated but visual short-term memory and drawing are not.
Summary
• Children’s facial self-portraits develop from age 3 to 11
• The eyes become lower in the face, wider and more oval
• The mouth becomes narrower and less ‘smiley’
• The head becomes narrower and the ears lower set
• Both children and adults set the eyes too high in the head
• If the nose is absent the eyes are lower and mouth higher
• The...
Observational drawing is fundamental to artistic practice, by enhancing perceptual processing (Kozbelt, 2001; Seeley & Kozbelt, 2008) and creativity (Chan & Zhao, 2010; Pratt, 1985) regardless of an artist's specialist medium. However the perceptual and memorial processes underlying drawing ability remain poorly characterised. The aim of this explo...
Learning to Perceive: Informing pedagogic practice through the empirical study of drawing Presentation Format: Paper Authors Qona Rankin (Royal College of Art)
Howard Riley (Swansea Metropolitan University)
Rebecca Chamberlain (University College London)
Nicola Brunswick (Middlesex University)
Chris McManus (University College London) Abstract Mas...
People vary in their ability to make accurate representational drawings. Cohen and Jones (2008) have suggested that individuals who draw poorly have problems in the perception of objects, so that the extent of shape constancy (phenomenal regression) correlates with drawing ability, there being a "robust negative relation between perceptual errors r...
Many dyslexic readers receive intensive reading instruction throughout childhood, and they learn to ‘compensate’ for their early reading difficulties but other signs of dyslexia usually remain throughout life. Poor spelling, in particular, is a typical sign of dyslexia in adulthood, so much so that it has been identified as the best single predicto...
The association between dyslexia and superior visuospatial ability is, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, robust. A small amount of empirical evidence also indicates that dyslexic individuals are disproportionately represented in professions and academic disciplines related to art and design; and biographies of great scientists (e.g. Thomas E...
This paper is a component of ongoing research by a team comprising an art school lecturer, a coordinator of dyslexic students' support, and psychologists interested in exploring correlations between drawing ability and factors such as mathematical ability, personality traits and dyslexia. It extends research by gathering and analysing data collecte...
Some art students, despite being at art school, cannot draw very well, and would like to be able to draw well. It has been suggested that poor drawing may be a particular problem for students with dyslexia (and a high proportion of art school students is dyslexic). In Study 1 we studied 277 art students, using a questionnaire to assess self-perceiv...