Selective cortical adaptations associated with neural efficiency in visuospatial tasks – the comparison of electroencephalographic profiles of expert and novice artists

Visuospatial cognition encapsulates an individual's ability to efficiently navigate and make sense of the multimodal cues from their surroundings, and therefore has been linked to expert performance across multiple domains, including sports, performing arts, and highly skilled tasks, such as drawing (Morrone and Minini, 2023). As neural efficiency posits a task-specific functional reorganization facilitated by long-term training, the present study employs a visuospatial construction task as a means of investigating the neurophysiological adaptations associated with expert visuospatial cognitive performance. Electroencephalogram (EEG) data acquisitions were used to evaluate the event-related changes (ER%) and statistical topographic maps of nine expert versus nine novice artists. The expert artists displayed overall higher global ER% compared to the novices within task-active intervals. Significant increases in relative ER% were found in the theta (t (10) = 3.528, p = 0.003, CI = [27.3,120.9]), lower-alpha (t (10) = 3.751, p = 0.002, CI = [28.2,110.5]), upper-alpha (t (10) = 3.829, p = 0.002, CI = [50.2,189.8]), and low beta (t (10) = 4.342, p < 0.001, CI = [37.0,114.9]) frequency bands, when comparing the experts to the novice participants. These results were particularly found in the frontal (t (14) = 2.014, p = 0.032, CI = [7.7,245.4]) and occipital (t (14) = 2.647, p = 0.010, CI = [45.0,429.7]) regions. Further, a significant decrease in alpha ER% from lower to upper activity (t (8) = 4.475, p = 0.001, CI = [21.0, 65.8]) was found across cortical regions in the novice group. Notably, greater deviation between lower and upper-alpha activity was found across scalp locations in the novice group, compared to the experts. Overall, the findings demonstrate potential local and global EEG-based indices of selective cortical adaptations within a task requiring a high degree of visuospatial cognition, although further work is needed to replicate these findings across other domains.