The Neural Basis of Mark Making: A Functional MRI Study of Drawing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compared to most other forms of visually-guided motor activity, drawing is unique in that it "leaves a trail behind" in the form of the emanating image. We took advantage of an MRI-compatible drawing tablet in order to examine both the motor production and perceptual emanation of images. Subjects participated in a series of mark making tasks in which they were cued to draw geometric patterns on the tablet's surface. The critical comparison was between when visual feedback was displayed (image generation) versus when it was not (no image generation). This contrast revealed an occipito-parietal stream involved in motion-based perception of the emerging image, including areas V5/MT+, LO, V3A, and the posterior part of the intraparietal sulcus. Interestingly, when subjects passively viewed animations of visual patterns emerging on the projected surface, all of the sensorimotor network involved in drawing was strongly activated, with the exception of the primary motor cortex. These results argue that the origin of the human capacity to draw and write involves not only motor skills for tool use but also motor-sensory links between drawing movements and the visual images that emanate from them in real time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".