Mental Imagery and Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Visualization in Art
Our research suggests that visual artists rely on object, rather than spatial, visualization 
in their work. We demonstrated that object visualization ability relates to specialization in visual art (Kozhevnikov, Blazhenkova, & Becker, 2010). Furthermore, the results from qualitative interviews with members of different professions (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, submitted) demonstrate that the visualization processes and experiences of visual artists during solving their professional tasks are unique from those of scientists and humanities professionals at all stages of imagery processing (generation, inspection, maintenance and transformation), and can be characterized as pictorial, holistic, and spontaneous.
Moreover, our results demonstrated that visual artists, who rely on visual-object processing, were able to form abstract representations of abstract visual art, while those who rely on visual-spatial processing (scientists) failed to form such abstract representations.
