Aesthetic Science Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience

by Shimamura, Arthur P.; Palmer, Stephen E.

• ISBN13: 9780199732142
• ISBN10: 0199732140
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

What do we do when we view a work of art? What does it mean to have an "aesthetic" experience? Are such experiences purely in the eye (and brain) of the beholder? Such questions have entertained philosophers for millennia and psychologists for over a century. More recently, with the advent offunctional neuroimaging methods, a handful of ambitious brain scientists have begun to explore the neural correlates of such experiences. The notion of aesthetics is generally linked to the way art evokes an hedonic response -- we like it or we don't. Of course, a multitude of factors can influencesuch judgments, such as personal interest, past experience, prior knowledge, and cultural biases. In this book, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists were asked to address the nature of aesthetic experiences from their own discipline's perspective. In particular, we asked these scholars to consider whether a multidisciplinary approach, an aesthetic science, could help connect mind,brain, and aesthetics. As such, this book offers an introduction to the way art is perceived, interpreted, and felt and approaches these mindful events from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Author Biography

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He investigates human memory and cognition using neuroimaging techniques and by studying individuals with memory disorders. Dr. Shimamura is a founding member of the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, has been a scientific advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium Science Museum, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to explore art, aesthetics and brain.

Stephen E. Palmer, is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus is on visual perception, a topic closely related to his color photography. He is the author of Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, an advanced, interdisciplinary textbook on visual perception. He is currently working on a new book about color: Reversing the Rainbow: Reflections on Color and Consciousness.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. xi
Toward a Science of Aesthetics: Issues and Ideas	p. 3
Philosophical Perspectives
The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology, and Neuroscience: Studies in Literature, Music, and Visual Arts	p. 31
Aesthetic Theory and Aesthetic Science: Prospects for Integration	p. 63
Triangulating Aesthetic Experience	p. 80
Art and the Anthropologists	p. 107
Aesthetic Science and Artistic Knowledge	p. 129
Psychological Perspectives
Empirical Investigation of an Aesthetic Experience with Art	p. 163
Hidden Knowledge in Aesthetic Judgments: Preferences for Color and Spatial Composition	p. 189
Processing Fluency, Aesthetic Pleasure, and Culturally Shared Taste	p. 223
Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience: An Overview of Empirical Aesthetics	p. 250
Artistic Development: The Three Essential Spheres	p. 276
Neuroscience Perspectives
Neuroaesthetics: Growing Pains of a New Discipline	p. 299
The Modularity of Aesthetic Processing and Perception in the Human Brain: Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Neuroaesthetics	p. 318
Art Compositions Elicit Distributed Activation in the Human Brain	p. 337
A Cognitive and Behavioral Neurological Approach to Aesthetics	p. 356
Neurology of Visual Aesthetics: Indian Nymphs Modern Art, and Sexy Beaks	p. 375
Index	p. 391
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