The Role Of Drawing On Divergent Thinking

A growing body of experimental work highlight the potential value of physical motions or physical state to favorably impact cognitive processes,and even simple motor activity can stimulate divergent thinking.Drawing is an activity in which mental components such as imagination,perception and motor activity cooperate with each other.If drawing is done first,how does it affect the performance of subsequent divergent thinking? In this study,two experiments were conducted to explore whether drawing is an effective strategy to facilitate divergent thinking and which mental components in the drawing actually promote divergent thinking.The purpose of experiment 1 to investigate whether drawing would provide a benefit to later divergent thinking performance.In experiment,the participants were divided into 3 group:(1a)free drawing group,(1b)designated topic drawing group,(1c)non-drawing control group.In the test stage,all three groups were given the test of divergent thinking in pictures and verbal,then the scores of these tests and the average of both them(the comprehensive score)are indicators of divergent thinking.The results show that both groups of drawing conditions perform better than the non-drawing control group,indicating that drawing is indeed an effective strategy to facilitate the performance of divergent thinking.In experiment 2,the participants were divided into three groups according to the mental composition of drawing activity:(2a)viewing drawing(looking at the given drawing,which contains the picture perception component),(2b)tracing drawing(tracing the given drawing,which contains the motor activity component and the picture perception component),(2c)imagining a drawing(imagining a picture freely by thinking aloud,which contains the picture conceiving component and the picture perception component).The results showed that the performance of the tracing group and the imagination group were significantly better than the picture viewing group.That meanings the effectiveness of drawing is related to these mental components,the more mental elements involved in drawing,the better divergent thinking performance.The results of experiment 1 and experiment 2 were further compared to determine which components of the drawing activity promoted divergent thinking.We can found that the divergent thinking performance of free drawing group(1a)is obviously better than that of 2a,2b and 2c,and there is no difference between the performance of 1c and 2a,indicating that divergent thinking boost provide by drawing could not be explained by a signal mental component.The divergent thinking performance of the non-drawing control group(1c)was significantly lower than that of 2b and 2c,and there was no difference with 2a.These result showed that what can effectively boost divergent thinking is not the component of picture perception,but the components of picture conceiving and drawing motor activity.Based on the above results,the present study could draw the following conclusions:(1)Drawing activities can promote the performance of subsequent divergent thinking.(2)The two elements of picture conceiving and motor activity in drawing play a major role in the facilitation of divergent thinking.