Over the past few years, there has been a flourishing of programs where professional training institutions (ranging from medical schools to police academies) hone students’ observational skills by having them look at art. For example, since 2004 the Frick collection has been running an educational program for the New York City Police Department, the FBI and the National Guard aimed at improving their visual observational skills (and communication skills) by having them look at and talk about art.
To be sure, improving observation is a valuable goal and observation is central to learning in the arts. In our studies of studio arts classrooms, my colleagues Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, Shirley Veenema and I found teachers consistently working on developing students’ ability to observe in more careful, complex and varied ways. And I like the idea of harried medical students and police officers being given the time and skills to look, think and talk carefully about what they see in artworks.
However, should we be skeptical of the underlying claim that looking at art leads to improved looking elsewhere? Does looking at and talking about a Rembrandt really help you analyze a crime scene or diagnose a patient? Do we have generic “visual observational skills” that can be translated between domains? And what do we mean by “visual observational skills” anyway?
At a simple level, there is a good deal of evidence that observational expertise is highly specialized. That is, you develop expertise in whatever it is you practice observing. Bird-watchers become highly skilled at recognizing, categorizing and distinguishing among different birds based on fleeting bits of visual information. There is no evidence (nor really any plausible theory) that their extensive knowledge and skills at bird-watching makes them better able to distinguish between different makes of cars, painting styles, or anything else. Neuroscientists term these highly skilled observations as “expert recognition pathways” and show evidence that it becomes a highly automatic, selective process involving a small area of the back of the brain called the fusiform gyrus. In other words, these skilled observations become automatic without time for conscious “thinking.”
Barring the neurological deficit proposagnosia, we all have an expert recognition pathway for recognizing faces (see Nancy Kanwisher’s work on this) and we develop new expert recognition pathways for anything we become more specialized at recognizing and categorizing. Participate in a research study and you'll develop an new expert recognition pathway for discriminating between "Greebles" (those pinkish 'characters' on your left). Play Halo all day and you’ll develop an expert recognition pathway that allows you to discern your enemies with the slightest visual information. It may help you a little when you move on to Resident Evil, but it probably won’t help you distinguish between your students if you’re a teacher, between tumors if you’re a radiologist, or between widgets if you’re on a factory line (more likely those students, tumors, or widgets will start curiously resembling Halo characters…).You have to build new paths for each new area of expertise.
But, of course, looking at art is more than just discriminating between widgets (though when I hear the median time a museum goer stops and looks at a painting is 17 seconds I do start to wonder). But if we’re going to talk about “visual observational skills” in looking at art and not just “interpretive skills," "analytic skills" or “reflective skills,” the roots and core of the skill need to be in a visual observational process. So what is it that our eyes and mind/brains are doing when we’re looking at art and why would anyone think doing it would make you a better cop, doctor, or anything else?
More to come on this in another post.
