Abstract
Among the main challenges of the predictive brain/mind concept is how to link prediction at the neural level to prediction at the cognitive-psychological level and finding conceptually robust and empirically verifiable ways to harness this theoretical framework toward explaining higher-order mental and cognitive phenomena, including the subjective experience of aesthetic and symbolic forms. Building on the tentative prediction error account of visual art, this article extends the application of the predictive coding framework to the visual arts. It does so by linking this theoretical discussion to a subjective, phenomenological account of how a work of art is experienced. In order to engage more deeply with a work of art, viewers must be able to tune or adapt their prediction mechanism to recognize art as a specific class of objects whose ontological nature defies predictability, and they must be able to sustain a productive flow of predictions from low-level sensory, recognitional to abstract semantic, conceptual, and affective inferences. The affective component of the process of predictive error optimization that occurs when a viewer enters into dialog with a painting is constituted both by activating the affective affordances within the image and by the affective consequences of prediction error minimization itself. The predictive coding framework also has implications for the problem of the culturality of vision. A person’s mindset, which determines what top–down expectations and predictions are generated, is co-constituted by culture-relative skills and knowledge, which form hyperpriors that operate in the perception of art.
Highlights
The old notion of perception as unconscious, knowledge-driven inference (Helmholz, 1860/1962) or hypothesis testing (Gregory, 1980), which asserts that the brain actively anticipates upcoming sensory input rather than passively registering it, has been recast in the terms of contemporary neuroscience, and has recently undergone an unprecedented revitalization
As I shall argue, the inter-individual differences in art perception depend on three variables: (i) personality traits/affective style – that is, how and why individuals differ in how they respond to emotional incentives (Davidson, 2004). These have a strong modulatory effect, especially with respect to the affective aspects of art perception, so, for example, individuals with neurotic and anxious personality traits are more sensitive to processing facial or bodily expressions in particular (Bishop, 2007; Cunningham et al, 2010; Cunningham and Brosch, 2012); (ii) culture-cognitive capital related to the experiential situation, that is, the skills and knowledge related to visual perception and viewing art works; and (iii) the momentary psychosomatic state of the observer
As recently articulated by Davis (2011, p. 230): “When we speak of visuality, rather than vision or visual perception, we address the difference introduced into human seeing by traditional cultural meaning consolidated and reconfigured in images.”
Summary
Reviewed by: Damian Kelty-Stephen, Grinnell College, USA Chris Frith, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, UK Fernando Vidal, Institució Catalana de Recerca I Estudis Avançats, Spain. Among the main challenges of the predictive brain/mind concept is how to link prediction at the neural level to prediction at the cognitive-psychological level and finding conceptually robust and empirically verifiable ways to harness this theoretical framework toward explaining higher-order mental and cognitive phenomena, including the subjective experience of aesthetic and symbolic forms. Building on the tentative prediction error account of visual art, this article extends the application of the predictive coding framework to the visual arts. It does so by linking this theoretical discussion to a subjective, phenomenological account of how a work of art is experienced. A person’s mindset, which determines what top–down expectations and predictions are generated, is co-constituted by culture-relative skills and knowledge, which form hyperpriors that operate in the perception of art
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