Artists and architects think differently than the rest of us, study finds

Architects, painters and sculptors think differently than other people a new study suggests as it found that they perceive spaces in a different manner. 

A new study has found that when it comes to describing places, architects and artists do things differently than the rest of us. For instance, architects seem to be focused on paths, barriers and delimitation while artists see the space much more like a two dimensional painting.

“We found that painters, sculptors and architects consistently showed signs of their profession when talking about the spaces we showed them, and all three groups had more elaborate, detailed descriptions than people in unrelated professions,” said senior author Dr Hugo Spiers  for UCL Psychology & Language Sciences.

The study was published in the journal Cognitive Science, and the researchers brought in 16 people from each of the three professions together with 16 participants without any relevant background, which acted like a control group

Those that participated were presented with a Google Street View image, a painting of St. Peter’s Basilica, and a computer-generated surreal scene. They had to describe the environment, explain how they would explore the space, and suggest changes to the environment in the image.

The scientists than analyzed the linguistic patterns used by the participants in order to better understand how they perceived spaces.

By looking at language systematically we found some consistent patterns, which turned out to be quite revealing, co-author Thora Tenbrink form Bangor University said.

For painters, the description switched between a 3D scene and a 2D image while architects used more dynamic language to describe the barriers and the boundaries of a space. And the sculptors fell somewhere in the middle between painters and architects.

For example, when it came to the furthest point of the space, the painters used the term “back” while the architects called it the “end”.

On the other hand,  the control participants gave less elaborate responses, which the authors say went beyond just a lack of expert terminology.

“Our study has provided evidence that your career may well change the way you think. There’s already extensive research into how culture changes cognition, but here we’ve found that even within the same culture, people of different professions differ in how they appreciate the world,” said Dr Spiers. “Our findings also raise the possibility that people who are already inclined to see the world as a 2D image, or who focus on the borders of a space, may be more inclined to pursue painting or architecture,” he said.