Aesthetics and Predictive Processing: Grounds and Prospects of a Fruitful Encounter (original) (raw)

Art, meaning, and aesthetics: The case for a cognitive neuroscience of art

2020

It is important to note that I am not suggesting that we should directly import the results of empirical psychology to aesthetics. The direct application of empirical results in aesthetics can, and very often does, go terribly wrong. What I suggest is that aesthetics should take some new paradigms of philosophy of perception seriously. The specific paradigm I am interested in here, the paradigm of multimodality, is based on a large body of empirical research. However, my aim is not to urge an empirical turn in aesthetics, but to urge a turn in aesthetics towards philosophy of perception, and this sometimes entails a turn towards empirically informed philosophy of perception.

Is Psychology Relevant to Aesthetics? A Symposium

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, 2019

acts and intentions and reactions and the psychophysiological systems that subserve them (the distinct visual pathways for action and object recognition, the body clock, the neural mirror system, the 'affect programmes' underpinning our basic emotions, and so on). And in parallel with Nanay, Smith argues that philosophical theorizing in relation to artistic creation and appreciation cannot proceed in isolation from psychological research. Insofar as the arts not only exploit but extend and stretch our ordinary perceptual, cognitive, and emotional capacities, affording us experiences that generally do not arise in ordinary settings, aesthetic theory must at once be attentive to the psychology of ordinary human behaviour, and work towards a psychology of specifically aesthetic behaviour. 4 Triangulation, then, articulates the 'relevance relation' that Dickie Introduction

What is the Cognitive Neuroscience of Art…and Why Should We Care? The American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter, 31(2), Summer 2011: 1-4.

There has been considerable interest in recent years in whether, and if so to what degree, research in neuroscience can contribute to philosophical studies of mind, epistemology, language, and art. This interest has manifested itself in a range of research in the philosophy of music, dance, and visual art that draws on results from studies in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. 1 There has been a concurrent movement within empirical aesthetics that has produced a growing body of research in the cognitive neuroscience of art. 2 However, there has been very little collaboration between philosophy and the neuroscience of art. This is in part due, to be frank, to a culture of mutual distrust. Philosophers of art have been generally skeptical about the utility of empirical results to their research and vocally dismissive of the value of what has come to be called neuroaesthetics. Our counterparts in the behavioral sciences have been, in turn, skeptical about the utility of stubborn philosophical skepticism. Of course attitudes change…and who has the time to hold a grudge? So in what follows I would like to draw attention to two questions requisite for a rapprochement between philosophy of art and neuroscience. First, what is the cognitive neuroscience of art? And second, why should any of us (in philosophy at least) care?

Art and Affect in the Predictive Mind - Book of Abstracts

More than 40 years ago, pioneering social psychologist Robert Zajonc (1980) published his seminal work titled "Preferences need no inferences" in which he argued for the primacy of affect over cognition. Affective evaluation (the preference) comes first, he claimed, and only then do cognitive processes (the inferences) kick in. The view is, of course, untenable in light of recent predictive processing accounts which hold that all mental functioning is built from (approximate) Bayesian inference. Predictive processing casts perception, action, and learning as inference, but, perhaps counterintuitively, valuation too. I will discuss specifically how valuation-understood as the process of how we come to value, prefer, or like things-emerges as a function of inference, and how this conception may help us resolve traditional conundrums in the science of aesthetic experience, such as the nature of the beholder's share, the link between curiosity and appreciation, and the tension between the mere exposure principle and the goldilocks principle.

Art, Meaning, and Perception: A Question of Methods for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Art

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2013

Neuroscience of art might give us traction with aesthetic issues. However it can be seen to have trouble modeling the artistically salient semantic properties of artworks. So if meaning really matters, and it does, even in aesthetic contexts, the prospects for this nascent field are dim. The issue boils down to a question of whether or not we can get a grip on the kinds of constraints present and available to guide interpretive behavior in our engagement with works of fine art. I argue that biased competition models of selective attention can be used to solve this problem, generalize to the affective content of our responses to artworks, and so show that research in cognitive neuroscience is germane to the types of problems of interest within the philosophy of art.

Cognition and Visual Art

Cognitive and other scientifically informed approaches to the visual arts and aesthetics have the potential to explain the emergence, development, and cross-cultural distribution of art forms. Neuroaesthetics explores the neural underpinnings of art appreciation and how the architecture of the brain may constrain the cross-cultural success of art forms. Approaches in evolutionary psychology focus on the ultimate causes of artistic behavior and explain the emergence of art as either an adaptation or a by-product of other evolved adaptations. Interdisciplinary work has attempted to address the limitations of these approaches by taking into account cultural differences and the role of context and history, with the aim of developing an integrative science of art.

Psychologizing Aesthetic Attention

2019

The main question driving the carefully crafted investigations developed in Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception and Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture is one which, in its modern guise, has arisen at increasingly regular intervals in our discipline: Is empirical psychology – broadly conceived – relevant to philosophical aesthetics?1 That is to say, can alternative approaches to art and aesthetic experience, including the methods yielding experimental, cognitive, and perceptual data about such experience, contribute to the ways in which philosophers examine aesthetic phenomena in a meaningful way. If so, how? There are at least two reasons why it has been important to return to this question with such frequency. First, what we mean by ‘psychology’ continues to evolve at an impressive pace. At least in its most current understanding, when we first start hearing about ‘naturalizing aesthetics’ between fifteen and twenty years ago, the project found its mos...

Is there an Aesthetic Brain? A brief essay on the Neuroaesthetic Quantification of beauty

Quantifying bodies and health. Interdisciplinary approaches, 2021

It is possible today to determine, with some precision (according to the most recent studies in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology), the areas of the brain and the neural networks involved when an individual contemplates art, when feeling pleasure, or when judging about aesthetic experience. However, many questions remain open. First, the philosophical question about the subjective nature of this kind of judgments. Then, what happens in the mind (or should it be said, in the brain?) of the beholder when contemplating art or judging in favor (or not) of the beauty of an object. And the ultimate question, if we have an aesthetic brain. Another issue that must be addressed is if bioart and especially neuroart can contribute to this analysis and if they can be effectively quantified as art. Thus, this brief essay seeks to provide some understanding about this questions but most importantly about the existence of an aesthetic brain, which may ultimately contribute to open doors to other problems of philosophy such as the hard brain-mind problem.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE AESTHETIC PRECOGNITION: THREAT OR OPPORTUNITY FOR CONTEMPORARY ART?

Universal Journal of Psychology, 2014

This article presents some findings of an ongoing experiment on the Beauty perception and aesthetic appreciation of the artworks, based for the first time on the use the most popular social network: Facebook. Exploiting the system of "like" and "share", on which Facebook is based, thousands of artwork images were submitted to a sample of over 10,000 users worldwide. Through the metrics analysis related to the aesthetic preferences expressed by the users, it was observed they are inclined to react the same way towards certain visual stimuli coming from artwork images: specific compositional characteristics of the artworks are able to influence the aesthetic preferences of the viewers towards some artworks rather than others. The steady repetition of aesthetic preferences related to same compositional elements present in the artworks allowed to predict the subsequent aesthetic choices by the viewers towards not yet posted artworks. We identified some of these responsive elements, which would be able to activate the Beauty recognition and the Aesthetic Pleasure in the perceivers. In this way it would be possible to develop an Aesthetic Algorithm able to identify the share of Beauty required to activate the Aesthetic Pleasure, by introducing specific responsive elements in the artworks with the aim of predicting, and also predetermining, the viewers reactions. The knowledge of the perceptual mechanisms capable of activating the Aesthetic Pleasure might allow to predict and influence beforehand the aesthetic preferences of viewers toward the artworks, with many implications for the current Art Market. We described this predictive analysis of aesthetic appreciation of the viewers as Aesthetic Precognition.