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Visual art is pervasive in modern society. From advertising to fine arts galleries, the visual arts play a visible role in how we view and understand the world. In this review, we consider research that speaks to whether our experiences with art can change the way we see. Numerous studies speak, often indirectly, to this question—addressing whether artists see things differently from nonartists. Specifically, we reviewed literature that investigates the ways artistic ability and artistic training interact with visual abilities from the perspective that artists can be described as experts in visual media. Some work suggests that those who identify as artists or undergo artistic training perform better than nonartists on measures of low-level vision, high-level perception, and visual cognition, and show differences in brain activity while engaged in perceptual or artistic tasks. Other studies do not support these conclusions, however, and report no differences between artists and nonartists. We conclude that experimentally designed and well controlled training studies are necessary to elucidate whether artistic training shapes the brain and its perceptual and cognitive processes or whether budding artists gravitate toward the visual arts because of existing visual abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood is a critical period for episodic memory development, with sharp behavioral improvements between ages 4 to 7 years. Prior work has demonstrated this extensively with prompted memory tasks, but we explored performance on unprompted, free recall of a naturalistic experience in children, and how their performance relates to other cognitive measures. We asked children and adults to view a television episode, a naturalistic task for which there exists a ground truth, and assessed their free recall memory for the episode. Children's free recall performance improved dramatically with age, with many young children producing no verbal free recall whatsoever, although prompted recognition memory measures showed retention of material. However, the detail in free recall was related to both recognition and temporal order forced-choice memory performance in our full sample, showing agreement among memory measures. Free recall was strongly predicted by verbal skills, suggesting that children's sparse recall reflects verbal skill development rather than a pure mnemonic deficit. We propose that free recall has a more protracted developmental trajectory because it requires more substantial verbal skills as well as metacognitive skills that direct memory search, as compared with forced-choice memory tasks., (© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)