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I’ve been reading several research papers lately with drawing as a task, and it’s gotten me riled up enough that it’s time for a rant thread. The short of it: Stop treating drawing as if there are no systems, no conventions, and that it’s an unmediated link to visual concepts 1/
First off, drawing is a complex cognitive activity involving numerous subsystems, not some direct pathway from perception (or visual imagery) to motor control as is assumed when using drawing in clinical contexts 2/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010945220304317
Drawings are not direct pathways to visual concepts, because they require a “visual vocabulary” to be learned and developed. People who “can’t draw” simply have not developed an extensive vocabulary 3/ https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/341842
Linguists have had intense, heated debates about the connections of language and thought… and yet drawing is somehow assumed as a direct, unmediated link to visual concepts? 4/
Here’s a paper that used a drawing task claiming that participants “created a novel communication system” to thus study “Universal principles of human communication” while also comparing Japanese and “Western” drawers 5/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.12664
Yet ironically to study these “universal” traits, they do a drawing task with Japanese and “Western” drawers— cultures which we know have different conventionalized drawing systems! 6/
You can even see this in the figures: When asked to draw “cartoon” and the Japanese participants drew a comic page which even conformed to conventions of manga layouts! 7/
None of these papers that use drawing as tasks cite any models or background research justifying their attitudes towards drawing itself, despite there being such a literature across psychology and development 8/ https://www.routledge.com/Making-Sense-of-Childrens-Drawings/Willats/p/book/9780805845389
In fact, not only are the use of these tasks based on common sense beliefs, the foundations of these assumptions have been discredited by myself and other researchers 9/
http://visuallanguagelab.com/P/NC_drawingframes.pdf
http://visuallanguagelab.com/P/NC_drawingframes.pdf
I made a similar argument about the fluency required of sequential visual narratives, meaning that research using them uncritically may be confounded, whether about narrative, temporal, social, or sequential cognition 10/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-019-01670-1
All of this is to say: drawing and visual communication is more complex than you think, and if they are used in science, they should be treated with the same rigor and respect as other human behaviors like language 11/
It is amazing that there is no consolidated field within the cognitive sciences to study drawing and visuals on par with (psycho)linguistics, which is a stunning way to indicate the low regard with which we treat the most species-specific behavior of human expression
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