Drawing on Perception

I was taking notes in one of my classes without realizing that I was sketching in the margins. I shifted from reflexive verbs in Spanish to drawing an eye, and it crossed my mind that I was using perception to draw. In Raymond De Young’s class, perception is defined as a cognitive process to recognize objects using the resources of one’s internal representations. Perception is valuable because everyone needs to know how to interpret the physical world around them through their senses. The internal representations from perception can later help an individual build their cognitive map, helping them make understanding of the world and make important decisions. When that idea came to mind I wondered about many other things: Why do I draw certain things and not others? How has drawing changed as I grow older, and what are the processes involved in drawing that I take for granted?

I began to look back in my notebook and see the sketches and doodles I have done over the semester. The drawings I encountered in my notebook were mostly of eyes, cat faces, and plants. All of them were comprised of lines and shading, and no sketch looked exactly alike with no definite features, but just enough information to help an individual identify the object. Even those that were incomplete were identifiable. My sketches were probably incomplete partially because of the power of perception. These sketches were simple to me from my past experiences, because of how many repetitions of cat faces and eyes I’ve seen in my 21 years of existence. Those experiences with the object helped simplify my internal representation to not require me to “complete” my drawings. It’s interesting - in order to draw these sketches, I had to focus on an internal representation of them with enough linkages in my neural network for me to define and realize the figure.

When I showed several friends my sketches, those both complete and incomplete, some had ease and others had much difficulty in perceiving the doodle. That demonstrated the challenges of perception and how biased it can be. Some could not manage the incompleteness, while others may not have had many encounters with what I drew to have a well-established internal representation. Like what Erin Hamilton said, perception can make us functionally blind, with people only able to concentrate on certain, usually common salient features and having an inability to recognize other features. A popular example of challenges that can happen with perception are people with schizophrenia, who have genetically, psychologically distorted perception. Below are art pieces of cats by Louis Wain, an artist with schizophrenia, each showing his change in perception as his illness continued.

 

I then tried to remember how drawing has changed throughout my lifetime. It was much more difficult to draw houses and animals when I was younger, but now I can draw faster and more accurately. When encountering things for the first time as a child, I saw objects in bits, like when learning new words. I sketched things looking piece by piece, and that’s because my channel capacities were very limited and couldn’t absorb all the information given. As I grew older, my channel capacities could transmit and collect more information of what I saw. This allows me to now draw objects less piece by piece and more in chunks. It’s like how we need to just see the word “draw” to understand the word rather than the letters D-R-A-W, making perception faster and simpler. To me, drawing has always been a hobby of mine, but it’s beautiful to understand how valuable it was for my ability to learn and understand the world around me. Drawing helped me grow up to perceive the world in a way that writing and reading couldn’t. This is why I see the importance of art classes in education. Drawing and painting can be a technique for children to strengthen perception and develop internal representations.

 

Doodling and sketching can also be a valuable restorative activity because it requires a little bit of directed attention on perception while allowing the drawer to have a chance to be mindful and reflect. Drawing is a valuable art and a way to practice one’s perceptual certainty and accuracy with visual memory. So the next time you feel like drawing, recognize that you are using one of the great skills of information processors: perception.