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Visual production & recognition

Shaping vision through drawing

Nature Reviews Psychology (2024)Cite this article

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Human communication, often framed in the context of natural language, consists of two tightly coupled processes — production and recognition. Whereas the latter is a regular fixture in the study of vision, rigorous studies on visual production have come into the limelight only in the past few decades. The study of visual communication applies the production–comprehension framework to investigate how people convey ideas through visual conduits such as graphs, diagrams, symbols and drawings. Freehand drawings, in particular, constitute a historically and culturally pervasive, flexible and accessible medium for externalizing and preserving thoughts.

A key characteristic of many freehand drawings (such as ancient cave art or a toddler’s sketches) is that they are abstract renderings that do not strictly adhere to the specific visual features of the target object concept. Yet, despite this visual divergence from real world referents, people are able to recognize drawings and use them for communication, planning and pedagogy.

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  • Patterson, K., Nestor, P. J. & Rogers, T. T. Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 8, 976–987 (2007)

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  • Vinker, Y., Alaluf, Y., Cohen-Or, D. & Shamir, A. Clipascene: scene sketching with different types and levels of abstraction. In Proc. IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision 4146–4156 (CVF, 2023)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Kushin Mukherjee

  2. Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Kushin Mukherjee

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  1. Kushin Mukherjee
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Correspondence to Kushin Mukherjee.

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Mukherjee, K. Shaping vision through drawing. Nat Rev Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00321-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00321-0

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