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In this paper, differences between multichannel EEG signals of artists and nonartists were analyzed during visual perception and mental imagery of some paintings and at resting condition using approximate entropy (ApEn). It was found that ApEn is significantly higher for artists during the visual perception and the mental imagery in the frontal lobe, suggesting that artists process more information during these conditions. It was also observed that ApEn decreases for the two groups during the visual perception due to increasing mental load; however, their variation patterns are different. This difference may be used for measuring progress in novice artists. In addition, it was found that ApEn is significantly lower during the visual perception than the mental imagery in some of the channels, suggesting that visual perception task requires more cerebral efforts.

In this article, differences in alpha power between multichannel EEG signals of artists and nonartists were investigated. The two groups were compared during visual perception, mental imagery, and at-rest conditions. We found no significant differences between the two groups in absolute alpha power at rest. Both absolute and relative alpha power were found to be significantly lower in artists during the visual perception and the mental imagery tasks for some of the channels, suggesting that the cerebral efforts of artists were higher during these conditions. These results indicate that artists considered more features of a painting compared to nonartists. The two groups differed in relative alpha power during the visual perception task compared to the at-rest condition. Relative alpha power values decreased during the visual perception for both groups; however, their variation patterns were different. More significant decreases in relative upper alpha power (10-12Hz) during the visual perception task for nonartists were observed, whereas more significant decreases in relative lower alpha power (8-10Hz) for artists during the visual perception task. These differences may be employed to measure progress in novice artists. In addition, it was found that upper phasic alpha power values were higher in artists compared to nonartists during the visual perception task. In the mental imagery task, lower phasic alpha power values were found to be higher in nonartists. However, the differences between the two groups were not significant in all of the channels indicating that EEG signals do not need to recorded in all channels when determining artistic expertise by absolute, relative, or phasic alpha power.

In this paper, we extracted scaling exponents of multichannel EEG signals recorded from two groups of artists and non-artists. We compared them to investigate the difference between artists and non-artists. The EEG signals were recorded while the subjects performed four tasks of visual perception, four tasks of mental imagery and at resting condition. We used Davies-Bouldin's index for evaluation of the feature space quality and the discrimination between the two groups. We observed a noticeable similarity in scaling exponents between visual perception and mental imagery. A considerable discrimination in scaling exponents was observed between the two groups at resting condition. However, the differentiation in scaling exponents between visual perceptions of the two groups was low. This result was observed in scaling exponents between the two groups' mental imageries, too. Thereby, the discrimination in scaling exponents between the two groups decreased with performing a same cognitive task. Additionally, we classified the scaling exponents which were related to the resting conditions and the visual perceptions of the two groups by the Neural Gas classifier. The average accuracies were 87.5% and 46.87%, respectively. These results confirmed the discrimination and the similarity in scaling exponents between resting conditions and visual perceptions of the two groups, respectively.

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