Portraits of Artists

Portraits of artists: emergence of visual creativity in dementia.

As a uniquely human talent that has evolved from prehistoric cave paintings, art draws on many brain areas responsible for various cognitive processes. The pattern of degeneration in dementia leads to predictable changes in art. The visuospatial deficits in Alzheimer disease lead to less precision and attention to spatial relationships. In some cases of frontotemporal dementia, artistic creativ...

Self-Portraits: Smartphones Reveal a Side Bias in Non-Artists

According to surveys of art books and exhibitions, artists prefer poses showing the left side of the face when composing a portrait and the right side when composing a self-portrait. However, it is presently not known whether similar biases can be observed in individuals that lack formal artistic training. We collected self-portraits by naïve photographers who used the iPhone™ front camera, and...

Portraits of Buddhist Women

Mental Rotation in Artists and Non-artists

This research was conducted to compare visuospatial skills in male and female artists and non-artists. Twenty artists (10 males and 10 females) and 20 non-artists (10 males and 10 females) were tested for accuracy and reaction time in a lateralized three-dimensional mental rotation task. Males had significantly fewer errors than females, which is consistent with previous research, but this main...

Artistic Rendering of Portraits

This chapter presents an overview of the latest artistic portrait rendering techniques. Artistic rendering or portraits can be viewed as an image generating process controlled by two factors. The first one is the face fidelity, namely, a rendered portrait image should preserve a certain amount of the original face’s information. The second factor is the artistic style, for example, sketch, pain...