The link between drawing and seeing in the brain

Drawing an object and naming it engages the brain in similar ways, according to research recently published inJNeurosci. The finding demonstrates the importance of the visual processing system for producing drawings of an object.

In a study by Fan et al.,healthy adults执行两个任务,研究人员记录了下来brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging: they identified pieces of furniture in pictures and produced drawings of those pieces of furniture.

The researchers used machine learning to discover similar patterns ofbrain activityacross both tasks within the occipital cortex, an area of the brain important for visual processing. This means people recruit the same neural representation of an object whether they are drawing it or seeing it.

As the participants drew each object multiple times, the activity patterns in occipital cortex remained unchanged, but the connection betweenoccipital cortexand parietal cortex, an area involved in motor planning, grew more distinct. This suggests that drawing practice enhances how the brain shares information about an object between different regions over time.