Nicolas J. Bullot

The artful mind meets art history: Toward a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework.

A study in the cognition of individuals’ identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties.

Toward a theory of the empirical tracking of individuals: Cognitive flexibility and the functions of attention in integrated tracking

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals (ETI) theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory ‘transparency’. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the targets location and identity.

The Principle of ontological commitment in pre- and postmortem multiple agent tracking

This commentary suggests that understanding the “Folk Psychology of Souls” requires studying a problem articulating ontology with psychology: How do human beings, both as perceivers and thinkers, track and refer to (1) living and dead intentional agents and (2) supernatural agents? The problem is discussed in the light of the principle of the ontological commitment in agent tracking.

Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification of living and social agents

To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identification. In contrast to universalist theories, contextualist theories appeal to particular historical and sociocultural contexts for explaining agent-identification. Contextualist theories tend to adopt idiographic methods aimed at recording the heterogeneity of human behaviours across history, space, and cultures. Defenders of the universalist approach tend to criticise idiographic methods because such methods can lead to relativism or may lack generality. To overcome explanatory limitations of proposals that adopt either universalist or contextualist approaches in isolation, I propose a philosophical model that integrates contributions from both traditions: the psycho-historical theory of agent-identification. This theory investigates how the tracking processes that humans use for identifying agents interact with the unique socio-historical contexts that support agent-identification practices. In integrating hypotheses about the history of agents with psychological and epistemological principles regarding agent-identification, the theory can generate novel hypotheses regarding the distinction between recognition-based, heuristic-based, and explanation-based agent-identification.

The Functions of Environmental Art

The psycho-historical theory of art posits that the functions of an artwork are effects of that artwork selected and reproduced because they fulfill humans’ mental and social needs. To develop this account, I hypothesize a cluster of core functions of environmental art, which encompasses effects such as tracking, broadcasting, emotions manipulation, cooperation, and critical reflection.

Artistic understanding matters to musical judgment: Comment on “From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: Towards a unified theory of musical emotions” by Patrik N. Juslin

If a student claims that he likes arithmetic but is unable to solve simple arithmetic problems, we would be justified in adopting a normative stance by arguing that his preference is shallow because he misunderstands arithmetic. In contrast, experts in empirical aesthetics seem to accept uncritically that a listener understands a piece of music if she claims that she likes it. In line with the psycho-historical framework introduced by Bullot and Reber [1,2], we argue that normative considerations play a role in the appreciation of music as central as in other domains such as ethics, mathematics, and the empirical sciences. While researchers in empirical aesthetics tend to dismiss the need for a theory of the normative aspects of artistic appreciation [3,4], Gilmore [5] and others [6] have stressed that normative aspects are crucial. We agree with Gilmore. Because the normative aspects of music cannot be understood independently from an understanding of the historical context of each musical artwork, any theory of musical judgment needs to take the historicality of music into consideration. Consequently, researchers need a theory that examines the design stance [1, 7,8] – a strategy through which an audience queries the historical context in which an artwork has been designed and transmitted – to explain musical judgments. In sum, our psycho-historical approach leads to questions regarding how artistic understanding emerges as a consequence of historical knowledge, and how historical understanding influences artistic evaluation. These psycho-historical considerations supplement the theory presented by Juslin [9] because they add a historical and normative dimension to his model, which is currently absent from his account of what he terms “aesthetic judgment” – a concept that we find problematic [see [2]]. Some artistic understanding may be provided to appreciators even if they do not have specific knowledge of the historical context of the musical artwork. For example, Bigand and Poulin-Charronnat [10] reviewed research suggesting that basic exposure to music is sufficient to experience similar patterns of emotions [11]. Music might evoke emotions automatically (e.g., by simulating prosodic features of speech). However, learning about the art-historical context in which a piece of music has been composed may help an audience to achieve a new kind of understanding. For example, learning that Shostakovich dedicated his Symphony No. 7 to the city of Leningrad as a symbol of resistance against the Nazi regime may elicit novel feelings and change a listener’s evaluation.

Keeping track of objects while exploring a spatial layout with partial cues: Location-based and direction-based strategies

Last year at VSS, Bullot, Droulez & Pylyshyn (2003) reported studies using a Modified Traveling Salesman Paradigm (MTSP) in which a virtual vehicle had to visit up to 10 targets once and only once, and in which the invisible targets were identified only by line segments pointing from the vehicle toward each target. We hypothesized that subjects used two distinct strategies: A “location-based strategy”, which kept track of where targets were located in screen coordinates, and a “segment-based strategy” that kept track of which segments corresponded to visited targets. We report new studies that further explore these two strategies. Subjects passively observed a computer-controlled virtual vehicle that visited a number of targets. Two forms of display were used: an “Allocentric” display, in which the vehicle moved and the targets remained fixed in screen coordinates, and an “Egocentric” display, in which the vehicles position on the screen remained fixed while the targets moved -- as if the environment were being viewed by an observer on the vehicle. At the end of each trial, the directional segments were extended to the edge of the screen and subjects were asked to perform two tasks by referring to these segments. In the “status task” observers had to indicate for each segment whether the corresponding target had been visited or not. In the “locating task” they had to locate each target along its directional segment. Performance on these two tasks measures the use of the two hypothesized strategies (segment-based and location-based). Results showed that observers do well on the status task with 4 or 6 targets in both display conditions, but do poorly on the locating task, especially in the egocentric condition when there are more targets. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in the egocentric condition the MTSP task is carried out primarily by segment-tracking, which can be viewed as a deictic strategy (Ballard et al., 1997; Pylyshyn, 2001).

History, Causal Information, and the Neuroscience of Art: Toward a Psycho-Historical Theory

Scientists in the behavioral and brain sciences argue that experimental studies of the perceptual, hedonic, and cognitive responses to works of art are the building blocks of an emerging science of aesthetic and artistic appreciation. This science is referred to with terms such as psychobiology of aesthetics (Berlyne 1971), neuroaesthetics (Chatterjee 2011), science of art (Ramachandran & Hirstein 1999), or aesthetic science (Shimamura & Palmer 2012). Proponents of a scientific approach to art often defend a psychological approach to art theory. Here, I use the term ‘psychological approach’ broadly to denote methods that attempt to explain aesthetic and artistic phenomena by means of reference to mental and brain mechanisms. Research in the psychology of art does not essentially differ from neuroaesthetics with respect to their relations to art history and philosophical aesthetics. Both neuroscientists and psychologists tend to think that art appreciation depends on internal mechanisms that reflect the cognitive architecture of the human mind (Kreitler & Kreitler 1972; Leder et al. 2004; Zeki 1999). Like neuroscientists, psychologists present artworks as ‘stimuli’ in their experiments (Martindale et al. 1990; McManus et al. 1993; Locher et al. 1996). Both traditions are dominated by the psychological approach understood as an attempt to analyze the mental and neural processes involved in the appreciation of artworks.

An Account of Image Perceptual Understanding Based on Epistemic Attention and Reference

Technological and scientific images, and other images with epistemic uses, have varied appearances and functions. They seem to be analog or symbolic representations available to researchers for a variety of epistemic purposes such as summarizing data, or presenting, discussing and verifying hypothetic propositions about the world. This article studies the perception and understanding of scientific/epistemic images within a conceptual framework grounded in the notion of reference. It introduces the hypothesis stating that the performance of the perceptual understanding of a particular scientific image depends on the epistemic uses of attention. The hypothesis suggests that understanding a scientific picture requires making an epistemic use of the attentional control of visual routines in order to obtain knowledge on the spatial structure and the referents of a particular image or graphic representation.