Copying people, landscapes, flowers in drawings/paintings requires good/excellent observation skills and may also facilitate memorisation?

How do students learn to observe? Art may help?

Yes, art is the answer and yes, many studies have proven that arts are beneficial at many levels for the brain. Cognitive style (learning styles) are linked to human perception. Our perception influences our creativity that express itself with colors, lines etc... In other words, if we are able perceive patterns of cognition (cognitive styles), we should be able to see how do these patters express themselves in the physical world. Can we perceive patters in the products of our artistic creativity? History says yes, but in the small scale of the arts classroom?  Very little research is dedicated to artistic expression and cognitive preferences. Lowenfeld and Witkin started working on cognitive styles and visual perception in the 70’s. But their work was kind on absorbed by the wave of theories surrounding the cognitive styles and multiple intelligences. The scientific controversy around cognitive styles makes this question difficult to tackle. However, recent theories and neuroscience came to confirm a lot of the behavioural and cognitive psychology discoveries... these render possible the search for a unifying theory of mind (part of my ongoing work). Never the less, regardless of the chosen theory, cognitive styles are extremely difficult to diagnose. Experiments have shown that even trained and experimented teachers cannot diagnose accurately their student’s cognitive style. My proposition involves visual arts productions as queues that will lead the art teacher in to a better diagnose of their student cognitive preferences....and I'm looking for recent references or anyone that may be intersted in these fields of reserach. 

Sorry if my English  is not perfect... my research is done in French...

What are the learning styles currently defined? Do they make use of the different senses? Perhaps some students prefer images to learn, others prefer sounds/music to learn, etc... ? Styles might also differ in the speed of presentation of stimuli, e.g. on television complex images are often presented for one second or less, but presumed to be efficient to capture the attention of the observer/learner?

Bonjour Marcel,

In order to better understand cognitive styles one must take in to account that there are 3 types of theorised models. Multi-dimensional, bi-dimensional and single-dimension models. Multi dimensional models are beautifully complex, hard to explain and have little practical application. Single dimension models are too restrictive, and in most cases are used to explain single dimensions in multi or bi-dimensional models.  I believe bi-dimensional  models can be complex enough to explain patterns of behaviour and their advantage is that they allow scientific vulgarisation with ease.

Most learning style models refer to a spectrum between rational and emotional intelligence. See Simon Baron-Cohen, 2005 in The Real Difference, the Truth About Autism, on empathising and systemising.

Cognitive styles have an impact on how students perceive information.  I’m also interested in how they express it in the arts class.

The stimuli question is interesting... and it has been explored in neuroscience in different ways, text and video see, Jack, A., Dawson, A., Begany, K., Leckie, R-L., Barry, K., Ciccia, A. et Snyder, A. (2012). fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. NeuroImage. However interesting, this question deviates from my initial question...

How do indivduals express their cognitive styles in society (and in the arts classroom) ? this may be another way to answer my question...

Hi Pedro, 

I encourage you to contact a colleague of mine, Dr Marta Kawka, from Griffith Uni who wrote a thesis on artistic practice and styles of learning. 

Regards, Kevin.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marta_Kawka

 Thank you so much!