Barb Bondy, a professor in the department of art and art history, is working with Jeffry Katz and PhD. student Martha Forloines in the department of psychology on a project they call “Drawing and Cognitive Neuroscience.”
The project focuses on the effect learning drawing skills has on the brain. The colleagues are working together to each bring their own expertise to the project. Bondy is contributing her years of experience in the art field while Katz and Forloines are contributing their knowledge of psychology and neuroscience. Ultimately, their goal is to find evidence of brain plasticity from the beginning to the end of a Drawing I course.
For Bondy her interest in the relation between visual arts and cognitive processes goes back to graduate school.
“I had been doing photography and drawing and I was trying to integrate them and I realized, oh you know, the commonality is the way of thinking about them,” Bondy said. Through this realization, Bondy became increasingly fascinated by the connection between the eye, the brain and where a drawing actually occurs.
The project has been in the works for years now.
“I met wonderful colleagues on campus in psychology who are very interested in listening to ideas and collaborating, bringing their interests and your interests together to find something new,” Bondy said.
Katz and Bondy have been meeting for about two years now sharing their own personal expertise with one another. They also applied for and received a grant that will go towards paying for the fMRI scanning. The colleagues have compiled piloting data in preparation for the 2017 spring semester in which the fMRI tests will occur.
“One of the important things for when you design imaging tests that are novel and new, that people haven’t done before, is you need to pilot out the psychological and behavioral experiments before you go to the scanner,” Katz said, on the process that has been required before testing can occur.
The Drawing I students involved in the project will have an fMRI test and be given various forms to arrange and draw in both the first and last weeks of the drawing course in order to record any differences in the two brain scans or two drawings.
Katz said, “There are certain areas of the brain involved in drawing, and studies have shown that there is a strengthening of connections between those areas. In this particular drawing class those connections are going to be there already, but the question is do they change?”
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