The relationship between age and musical creativity is not well understood, especially within the jazz idiom. In this study, ratings of 17,416 jazz albums recorded by 921 artists, sourced from a popular music review website, were analyzed. Creativity was operationalized in two different ways: 1) as hit ratios (the proportion of albums that received the critics' highest rating), and 2) as album ratings (based on the unmodified 9-point scale used by the critics). Results from generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) indicated that hit ratios peaked sharply around the age of 28 before rapidly declining. In contrast, album rating increased with age, with average ratings higher when artists were in their 60s and 70s than during their earlier years. Follow-up analyses indicated that this trend could be attributed to a reduced number of "inferior" albums-those with below-average ratings-among older artists. Implications for lifespan creativity and avenues for future research are discussed.

The attentional demands of drawing require both local processing of an object's details and global processing of its overall structure. In this study, we examined the extent to which artists have superior local and global processing skills, how these skills relate to artists' ability to draw realistically and to autistic-related traits, and whether artists initially take a local or global approach to drawing. Forty first-year college art students and 41 nonart students completed two tasks assessing local processing and two tasks assessing global processing. Participants completed two drawing tasks that assessed their ability to draw realistically, two copying tasks that assessed whether they showed a preference for initially copying the local or global aspects of an object, and the Autism-Spectrum Quotient that assessed autistic-related traits. We found that art students outperformed nonart students on both the local and global processing tasks and that drawing ability was related to performance on these tasks. We also found that art students were more likely than nonart students to initially copy the global features in their drawings. Finally, we found that art students did not exhibit more autistic-related traits than nonart students and that the number of autistic-related traits was unrelated to performance on the local and global processing, drawing, or copying tasks. These results suggest that art students have an attentional flexibility that allows them to process information at a local and global level but that they have a preference for initially drawing globally.

This commentary situates Friedman et al. (2024) – and by extension, Clemente et al. (2021) – within a broader research context. Both papers raise important issues, but neither study’s result can be considered definitive. The operationalization and assessment of aesthetic constructs across many investigations should reflect the inherent diversity of human artmaking, yielding a structured sense of the conditions under which modality-specific versus modality-general representations predominate in aesthetic or evaluative cognition. Additionally, I note that this research enterprise touches on two sets of issues, which are simultaneously central to an understanding of the nature of human artistry, yet which remain under-represented in contemporary research. One concerns the murky evolutionary origin of our human artistic capacity, including the role of cross-modal processing and its role in aesthetic cognition. The second involves the first-person deployment of this capacity in creative problem solving, rather than in a merely receptive mode. Both speak to the importance of understanding inherent structure and constraints on human aesthetics and creativity.

Article Steven Brown. The Unification of the Arts: A Framework for Understanding What the Arts Share and Why was published on December 1, 2022 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 6, issue 2).

Abstract Abstract: We present a model for talent development in music that resulted from applying a general framework for Talent development in Achievement Domains (i.e., the TAD framework; Preckel et al., 2020) to the domain of music. The talent development model in the musical domain (TAD music model) draws on the existing literature on musical talent development but also specifies a rigorous framework drawn from empirical research that can be used to identify predictors and indicators of musical talent. The TAD music model provides a multidimensional, dynamic view of talent development in music. Cognitive abilities, personality traits, and psychosocial skills that can potentially serve as predictors at different levels of talent development in music are suggested. The TAD music model can be used to further understandings about the nature of musical talent and its development, for the construction of diagnostic procedures, for empirical investigations of talent development in music, for the training of music teachers’ diagnostic skills, and for the identification and promotion of musically talented children.

Across human cultures, artistry and aesthetic behaviors are pervasive and varied, but they also show some underlying similarities. Socio-cultural explanations emphasize cross-cultural variation; psychobiological explanations emphasize commonalities, often attributing aesthetic regularities to evolutionary forces. Building on a psychobiological foundation, I argue that just as finished artworks inform human aesthetics, systematic patterns of trans-historical changes within fine arts traditions do so as well. Amply documented trans-historical trends show that creators continually seek critical attention through originality. A rampant drive for novelty eventually runs counter to evolutionarily ingrained aesthetic biases, making artworks less effective at communicating. This tendency is evident in elite art forms in recent generations, leading to a postmodern ‘crisis’ within those traditions. Speculating on future developments in the arts, I argue that human nature will continue to strongly constrain the arts, especially in their more popular forms; however, when technology arises that fundamentally usurps or supplants human nature, all bets are off about what the arts will be like, what functions they may serve, and whether something akin to the arts even need endure.

A growing body of correlational research has revealed systematic relationships between various aspects of visuospatial processing and representational drawing ability.However, very few studies have sought to examine the longitudinal development of the relation between drawing and visuospatial ability.The current investigation explored change in drawing and visuospatial skill in art students taking a foundational drawing course (n = 42) in a longitudinal design.Measures of representational drawing skill, dispositional traits, and visuospatial skill were taken at three time points over the course of five months.The findings reveal improvements in representational drawing, mental rotation, disembedding figures, and attentional switching.However, individual differences in change over time on one task did not predict change in another, revealing implications for domain-specific and domain-general aspects of art and design expertise.

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 24 November 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.787238

Positive aesthetic experiences plausibly involve viewers' ability to construct meaning by regarding art as a communicative process. Here we develop and analyze results of a survey extending the Gricean communication framework from language to visual art. Operationalizing the 4 Gricean maxims and an index of intent, we assessed their predictive power for artists' and nonartists' aesthetic liking of paintings varying in level of abstraction. Results showed that perceived maxim fulfillment was positively related to increased aesthetic liking and that most maxims maintained consistent predictive power across raters. Comparisons of artists' and nonartists' ratings on highly abstract versus representational paintings showed a consistent strong effect for painting type, with representational paintings receiving generally higher ratings on each maxim, intent, and liking by both groups. The Gricean framework is a fruitful means of capturing perceived artistic communication and aesthetic liking, and we discuss ways of developing this model, for instance, in distinguishing maxim fulfillment from understanding nonfulfillment as intentional.

Article Samuel J. Keyser. The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century was published on December 1, 2020 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 4, issue 2).

Gatekeeping is an ever-present feature in the distribution of and access to educational resources in many aspects of our lives. In high performance domains, a gatekeeping process determines acceptance into elite training programs, invitations to perform, drafting onto elite sports teams, and matriculation into graduate school. Gatekeeping can be defined as the process by which an arbiter influences high performers’ transitions between and ascension within developmental stages and can culminate with outstanding performance in a field. In this article, we briefly review the history of the research of gatekeeping. Next, we consider criteria that are specifically related to the role of gatekeeping in high performance and, then, we explore gatekeeping in the domains of the performing arts, sport, and academics. The final section discusses future directions for investigation and enhancement of the practice.

This chapter reviews how expertise impacts aesthetic experience and cognition. It first lays out some well-established methods and findings from the extensive research literature on expertise and expert performance and discusses how these relate to empirical aesthetics. Next, it describes general psychological mechanisms and models of aesthetic processing, emphasizing the potential role of expertise in modulating aesthetic cognition within such models. Since expertise is highly domain-specific, the chapter then proceeds sequentially through a range of aesthetic domains: visual art, design, architecture, photography, music, dance, writing, acting, and film. In each case, behavioral measures (self-report and performance indices) and neuroscientific findings are considered where available. When possible, the chapter discusses not only aesthetic response but also performance and creativity as aspects vital for understanding expertise and its effects in aesthetic domains. After reviewing the aforementioned domains individually, the concluding section attempts to integrate these points by highlighting consistent patterns of results and by briefly considering a few unresolved conceptual issues.

Achievement in different domains, such as academics, music, or visual arts, plays a central role in all modern societies. Different psychological models aim to describe and explain achievement and its development in different domains. However, there remains a need for a framework that guides empirical research within and across different domains. With the talent-development-in-achievement-domains (TAD) framework, we provide a general talent-development framework applicable to a wide range of achievement domains. The overarching aim of this framework is to support empirical research by focusing on measurable psychological constructs and their meaning at different levels of talent development. Furthermore, the TAD framework can be used for constructing domain-specific talent-development models. With examples for the application of the TAD framework to the domains of mathematics, music, and visual arts, the review provided supports the suitability of the TAD framework for domain-specific model construction and indicates numerous research gaps and open questions that should be addressed in future research.