William P. Seeley

Art, Artists, and Perception: A Model for Premotor Contributions to Perceptual Analysis and Form Recognition

Artists, art critics, art historians, and cognitive psychologists have asserted that visual artists perceive the world differently than nonartists and that these perceptual abilities are the product of knowledge of techniques for working in an artistic medium. In support of these claims, Kozbelt (2001) found that artists outperform nonartists in visual analysis tasks and that these perceptual advantages are statistically correlated with drawing skill. We propose a model to explain these results that is derived from a diagnostic framework for object recognition and recent research in cognitive neuroscience on selective visual attention. This research demonstrates that endogenous shifts of visual attention enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and inhibit the perception of potential distracters. Moreover, it demonstrates complementary roles for spatial schemata and motor plans in visual attention. We argue that artists develop novel spatial schemata, which enable them to recognize and reproduce stimulus features sufficient for adequate artistic production in a medium, and that these schemata become encoded as motor plans as artists develop technical proficiency in a medium. We hypothesize that artists’ perceptual advantages can therefore, be explained by the role spatial schemata and motor plans play in selective attention.

Naturalizing aesthetics: art and the cognitive neuroscience of vision

Abstract Recent advances in our understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of perception have encouraged cognitive scientists and scientifically minded philosophers to turn their attention towards art and the problems of philosophical aesthetics. This ‘cognitive turn’ does not represent an entirely novel paradigm in the study of art. Alexander Baumgarten originally introduced the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer to a science of perception. Artists’ formal methods are a means to cull the structural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from a dense flux of sensory information in conscious experience. Therefore he interpreted artists’ formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception, and art as a field whose interests overlapped with aesthetics. In what follows, I examine three approaches to cognitive science and aesthetics that rest on a tacit assumption of Baumgartens program. I argue that, whereas this new research can explain how viewers perceptually recover the content of artworks, it does not explain what makes that content aesthetically interesting. Therefore, the challenge for cognitive science and aesthetics is to tie the perceptual practices of artists and viewers to their more narrowly construed aesthetic, or artistic, practices. What is needed to establish this link is an interpretation of Baumgartens original definition of aesthetics that treats attention to the way the formal structure of an artwork works to perceptually convey its content as a source of aesthetic interest. Unfortunately this interpretation is not transparently established by explanations of the perceptual practices of artists and viewers. Therefore, I conclude that it remains an open question whether this research can contribute to philosophical aesthetics.

Olfaction, valuation, and action: reorienting perception

In the philosophy of perception, olfaction is the perennial problem child, presenting a range of difficulties to those seeking to define its proper referents, and its phenomenological content. Here, we argue that many of these difficulties can be resolved by recognizing the object-like representation of odors in the brain, and by postulating that the basic objects of olfaction are best defined by their biological value to the organism, rather than physicochemical dimensions of stimuli. Building on this organism-centered account, we speculate that the phenomenological space of olfaction is organized into a number of coarse affective dimensions that apply categorically. This organization may be especially useful for coupling sensation to decision making and instrumental action in a sensory modality where the stimulus space is especially complex and high dimensional.

Philosophy of art and empirical aesthetics: resistance and rapprochement

The philosophy of art and empirical aesthetics are, to all outward appearances, natural bedfellows, disciplines bound together by complementary methodologies and the common goal of explaining a shared subject matter. Philosophers are in the business of sorting out the ontological and normative character of different categories of objects, events and behaviors, squaring up our conception of the nature of things, and clarifying the subject matter of different avenues of intellectual exploration through careful conceptual analyses of often complex conventional practices. Psychologists have developed careful empirical methods for measuring and modeling behavior, methods that are fruitfully used in practice to test and evaluate hypotheses about the nature of our cognitive and emotional engagement with the world. So, for all appearances, philosophy and psychology share in the common task of sorting and testing theories about the nature of art and artistic practices (e.g., what is an artwork, what is the nature of the productive practices involved in creating these kinds of artifacts and what is the nature of a consumer’s artistic engagement with these artifacts). Unfortunately appearances can be deceptive. Despite common calls for rapprochement, the two disciplines rarely meet. There are both methodological and ideological reasons for this rift, and not surprisingly they are related. In what follows, I will explore and evaluate some of the central sources of resistance on both sides of this divide, introduce a model for the possibility of rapprochement, and briefly sketch the promise and pitfalls of current research in two areas, dance and film, where an active attempt at bridging the divide between philosophy and empirical aesthetics is underway.