随着心理学研究包含更多的自然主义问题和大规模的分析方法,绘画已经成为研究认知的令人兴奋的工具。绘图提供了关于我们如何看待世界的丰富信息,从大部分真实的感知表示到抽象的元认知表示。绘图还需要集成多个过程(例如,愿景,记忆,运动学习),和绘图经验可能会对这些过程产生影响。因此,绘画提出了几个有趣的认知问题,同时也提供了一种方法来获得洞察许多其他人。本期特刊以25项前沿研究为特色,利用绘画揭示了心理学领域的发现。这些不同的研究调查了儿童的绘画,年轻人,老年人,和特殊人群,如失明的人,顺行性健忘症,失用症,和语义痴呆症。这些研究详述了关于记忆机制的新发现,注意,数学推理,和其他认知过程。他们采用了一系列方法,包括心理物理实验,深度学习,和神经成像。最后,其中许多研究涵盖了绘画作为一个过程对其他认知过程的影响,包括绘画专业知识如何影响其他过程,如视觉记忆或空间能力。总的来说,这些研究为绘画作为心理学家用来理解复杂现象的普通工具的令人兴奋的未来铺平了道路。
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 the integration of multiple processes (e.g., vision, memory, motor learning), and experience with drawing can have an impact on such processes. As a result, drawing presents several interesting cognitive questions, while also providing a way to gain insight into a multitude of others. This Special Issue features 25 cutting-edge studies utilizing drawing to reveal discoveries transversing fields in psychology. These diverse studies investigate drawing across children, young adults, older adults, and special populations such as individuals with blindness, anterograde amnesia, apraxia, and semantic dementia. These studies detail new discoveries about the mechanisms underlying memory, attention, mathematical reasoning, and other cognitive processes. They employ a range of methods including psychophysical experiments, deep learning, and neuroimaging. Finally, many of these studies cover topics about the impact of drawing as a process on other cognitive processes, including how drawing expertise impacts other processes like visual memory or spatial abilities. Overall, this collection of studies paves the way for an exciting future of drawing as a commonplace tool used by psychologists to understand complex phenomena.