Changes in style as a diagnostic medical tool or a way to study creativity in art?
- Author(s)
- Helmut Leder, Julia Sophia Crone
- Abstract
“Any two paintings, for example, must differ in at least a thousand respects. If we find a reliable difference between
reactions to the two paintings, any one of these factors, or any combination of them, could be responsible for the
difference.”
[Daniel E. Berlyne (1974, p. 182)]
Pelowski et al. [1] have presented a comprehensive compilation of previous findings, a probably nearly complete
image collection extracted from these reviewed studies, and they discuss possible interpretations regarding the extent
to which changes in creative, almost exclusively artistic products could be indicative of specific neurodegenerative
diseases. They present an impressive scope of different methods and approaches. The combination of literature analysis, an empirical investigation of the extracted drawings and artworks, and the way they lay out a recommendation
for a validated, systematic approach to objectively evaluate artworks relevant to the neurodegenerative disease at hand
make this a valuable step into a new area of considering features of art-making as a clinically relevant diagnostic tool.
However, we doubt that this procedure can be further developed into a valid tool for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases, mainly as discussed below, because the necessary validation steps can hardly be implemented. However, when
considering this, it becomes evident that the presented methods clearly have the potential to make an impact on basic
research in empirical aesthetics, in which alterations in the creative process are important to understand creativity and
its underlying mechanisms.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Vienna Cognitive Science Hub
- Journal
- Physics of Life Reviews
- Volume
- 46 (2023)
- Pages
- 52-55
- ISSN
- 1571-0645
- Publication date
- 04-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501011 Cognitive psychology
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/changes-in-style-as-a-diagnostic-medical-tool-or-a-way-to-study-creativity-in-art(60ac2b9b-4141-498d-af55-388ce1839613).html