Creative Aptitude and Artistic Expertise

This study was part of a project on neuroaesthetics, which addressed issues pertaining to domain-general and domain-specific neural organization among art students in a variety of fields (visual arts, dance, piano, strings, vocals, percussions) and non-artist healthy controls. To facilitate inter-group comparisons, we had all of the artists undergo the same psychological assessments and neuroimaging using the same scanning protocols. In the current study, we focused exclusively on VAs and controls. Creativity can be a core mental competence of VA since the process of creating artwork reflects VA’s creativity (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 2020 ). Thus, all participants took the self-reported 40-item Chinese version of the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA) to assess their aptitude in tasks involving visual (figural) and verbal manipulation (Chen, 2006 ). The ATTA is commonly used for cross-artist group comparisons (not addressed in the current study); however, it includes a figural part that engages creative drawing mirroring the visual art training of VAs. The ATTA measures the ability to think creatively in terms of fluency, originality, elaboration, and flexibility (Chen, 2006 ). Fluency refers to the number of ideas that a participant can generate in a limited time. Originality indicates one’s ability to create unique ideas. Elaboration indicates the ability to embellish ideas with details. Flexibility indicates one’s ability to generate many different ideas (Althuizen et al., 2010 (link); Shen and Lai, 2014 (link)). The ATTA creativity index (CI) score refers to the sum of the four capacity scores. We followed standard protocols in administering and scoring the tests (Chen, 2006 ). SPSS Statistics (v. 23.0, IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA) was used for all psychological evaluation analyses. The results of the psychological evaluations were considered significant at p < 0.05.