Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 125, Issue 1, October 2012, Pages 26-36
Cognition

Uncovering the connection between artist and audience: Viewing painted brushstrokes evokes corresponding action representations in the observer

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.06.012Get rights and content

Abstract

Observed actions are covertly and involuntarily simulated within the observer’s motor system. It has been argued that simulation is involved in processing abstract, gestural paintings, as the artist’s movements can be simulated by observing static brushstrokes. Though this argument is grounded in theory, empirical research has yet to examine the claim. Five experiments are described wherein participants executed arm movements resembling the act of painting horizontal brushstrokes while observing paintings featuring broad, discernable brushstrokes. Participants responded faster when their movement was compatible with the observed brushstrokes, even though the paintings were irrelevant to their task. Additional results suggest that this effect occurs outside of awareness. These results provide evidence that observers can simulate the actions of the painter by simply observing the painting, revealing a connection between artist and audience hitherto undemonstrated by cognitive science.

Highlights

► We examined if observers could simulate a painter’s actions by observing their art. ► Observers’ movements were faster if compatible with the painter’s brushstrokes. ► This effect occurs outside conscious awareness. ► Action may be part of the perception of gestural painting.

Introduction

In this gesturing with materials the esthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which… can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained within the act (Rosenberg, 1960).

When Harold Rosenberg coined the term “action painting” in 1952 he was making a point about the nature of art. He argued that action painters, such as Pollock and de Kooning, showed how the act of creation was inseparable from the final product. Rather than windows into a still scene, their paintings were physical events. This new style was characterized by the artist’s movement: paint was smeared, dribbled, and broadly stroked across canvases. In addition to form, colour, and composition, action painters used their own movement as an element of visual design.

The action painters’ departure from a strict adherence to classic technique and design is paralleled by recent developments in theories of cognition and art. Traditionally, these theories have focused on how perception processes visual characteristics of art, such as orientation, grouping, perspective, proportion and colour (Kubovy, 1986, McManus et al., 1993, Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1999, Solso, 1996, Zeki, 1999). Recently, Freedberg and Gallese (1997) expanded on these theories by proposing that viewing art involves perceiving action. Specifically, they proposed that observers implicitly recreate the motor programs of the artist’s creative actions while viewing their paintings. Just as the action painters believed that movement was a crucial aesthetic element of creating a painting, Freedberg and Gallese proposed that implicit imitation of the act of creation is involved in perceiving a painting.

Freedberg and Gallese’s proposal is based on research on the perception of action. Observing another person’s actions automatically activates imitative action representations within our own motor system, a process known as motor simulation (Gallese, 2005, Knoblich and Sebanz, 2006, Wilson and Knoblich, 2005). While most research on motor simulation examines its involvement in the observation of actions, several studies show how motor simulation is also involved when observing the results, or traces, of actions. For example, viewing written symbols evokes simulations of the actions required to draw them (Knoblich, Seigerschmidt, Flach, & Prinz, 2002), and viewing digital text causes simulation of typing in expert typists (Beilock & Holt, 2007). Imaging studies have shown that viewing static letters caused activation in left ventral premotor cortex (BA6), an area that is also active in handwriting (Longcamp, Anton, Roth, & Velay, 2003). The same area is activated in the right hemisphere when left-handers are studied (Longcamp, Anton, Roth, & Velay, 2005). These imaging studies suggest that viewing writing evokes simulation of the actions required to produce the text. These studies support the idea that observers can recover a dynamic motor plan simply by observing its static trace. Based on this research, Freedberg and Gallese (2007) argued that observing paintings that feature deliberate gesture, like the action painters’ work, evokes motor simulations.

If merely viewing a painting can evoke simulations of the artists’ original actions, then the action painters may have been so evocative because they were tapping into something fundamental about the way we perceive each other’s movements. However, if one is to simulate Jackson Pollock’s actions it must be done indirectly, as he has been quite dead since 1956, and is therefore inanimate. Fortunately, his paintings persist as a historical record of his actions. Observers can simulate the actions in a painting because the brushstrokes contain information about the artist’s movements. The brushstroke as a visual object expresses high correspondence to its parent movements. It specifies the trajectory, force and perhaps even posture of the artist as he created it. In other words, the gestural aspects of the original action that we might consider ‘expressive’ are all preserved in a brushstroke, as though it were a fossil of the action.

If a brushstroke contains visual signals that describe its parent action, and if these diagnostic signals are associated with brushstroke actions, then vision of the brushstroke may evoke a motor simulation of the parent action. Further support for this notion can be drawn from the common coding hypothesis, which posits that planned actions and their perceivable consequences have a shared, bidirectional representation (Hommel, Musseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001). At a proximal level, the movement of the arm and the percept of the brushstroke possess exclusive motor and sensory codes, respectively. But at a higher level, these elements may become coded into a shared representation that allows bidirectional associations between the percept and the action. Thus, the perception of a brushstroke would be able to prime actions with shared distal features. In this way, an observer can recover an artist’s dynamic motor plan by observing its static trace.

By proposing a role for motor processes in the aesthetic experience of visual art, Freedberg and Gallese (2007) expanded on theories of visual aesthetics in a manner that mirrored the action painters’ departure from contemporaneous style: both realized that art was being thought of as a strictly visual subject, and both responded by incorporating action. Regarding gestural art, Freedberg and Gallese’s (2007) proposal can be distilled into three components: (1) observing gestural artwork causes motor simulation of the artist’s actions; (2) this simulation engages mental states or intentions commonly associated with the simulated actions; (3) accessing these mental states affects aesthetic experience of the painting. As intriguing as this theory may be, to date, there is no empirical evidence supporting (1), the claim that observing art involves motor simulation. Without support for this claim, (2) and (3) cannot stand. To test their first claim, we investigated whether viewing paintings with discernable brushstrokes would influence observers’ behaviour in a manner predicted by theories of motor simulation.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Observed actions interfere with the performance of executed actions if they are incongruent (Kilner, Paulignan, & Blakemore, 2003), an effect attributed to competition between motor programs. Here, we examined if observing static, unidirectional brushstrokes automatically activates corresponding motor programs. If so, participants should be slower to make concurrent movements that are incompatible with those brushstrokes and faster to make movements that are compatible.

Experiment 2

Thus far, the results suggest that people simulate the movements that created the viewed stimuli, even when not explicitly tasked with responding to these movements. To further investigate the automaticity of these effects, we used a task in which the painting was entirely irrelevant to the response and was merely background on which the task-relevant stimuli was presented. Arbitrary symbols were superimposed upon the paintings to indicate which direction participants should respond. Results

Experiment 3

The results of Experiments 1 and 2 show that observing brushstrokes, the traces of actions, interfered with concurrent opposing actions. We argued that the visual information in the brushstrokes that specified the gestural information enabled simulation of the observed action. However, the brushstrokes also contained asymmetric visual information that could have led to a purely visual effect. A canonical brushstroke begins with a heavy application of paint and thins as the painter draws the

Experiment 4

The stimuli in Experiment 3 were created to resemble the visual signature of actual brushstrokes without any gestural information. These stimuli evoked the opposite pattern of results as was found in Experiments 1 and 2. This suggests that visual properties of brushstrokes cannot account for the findings of Experiments 1 and 2. To further investigate the role of gestural information on these responses, we modified the original stimuli so that the gestural information was degraded. We created

Experiment 5

The evidence presented thus far is consistent with the idea that viewing a painting engages observers in a motor simulation of the artist’s actions (Freedberg & Gallese, 2007). If observers are truly engaged in a motor simulation, then the reported compatibility effect in Experiments 1 and 2 should vary as a function of the similarity between the observed and executed actions. Conversely, these compatibility effects could be caused by stimulus–response (S–R) compatibility between the spatial

General discussion

The present results suggest that art is not perceived independently of the actions that created it. Observers automatically simulated the actions implied by a painting’s brushstrokes, revealing a connection between the artist and audience never before demonstrated by cognitive science. This result confirms the action painters’ anecdotal insight that action is expressed through painting. It is remarkable because it implies a new aspect of the cognitive processing of abstract, gestural art. These

Acknowledgments

Jessica K. Witt was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0957051). We thank Lauren Parmley for her assistance in collecting data.

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