•  48
    Kinesthetic Understanding and Appreciation in Dance
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (2): 177-186. 2013.
    The idea that choreographic movements communicate to audiences by kinetic transfer is a commonplace among choreographers, dancers, and dance educators.1 Moreover, most dance lovers can cite their own favorite examples—the bounciness of the Royal Danish Ballet, the stomping of Bharata Natyam performers, the stag leaps in the thundering Greek chorus in Martha Graham’s Night Journey, or the contagious rhythmic transfer that takes over our feet when we watch classic tap dancers like Buster Brown. Th…Read more
  • It has recently been suggested that research in neuroscience of art has failed to bring art into focus in the laboratory. Two general arguments are brought to bear in the regard. The common perceptual mechanisms argument observes that neuroscientists working within this field develop models to explain art relative to the ways that artworks are fine-tuned to the operations of perceptual systems. However, these perceptual explanations apply equally to how viewers come to recognize and understand a…Read more
  •  26
    Olfaction, valuation, and action: reorienting perception
    with Jason B. Castro
    Frontiers in Psychology 5. 2014.
    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 physico-chemical dimensions of stimuli. Building…Read more
  •  23
    Hearing How Smooth It Looks
    Essays in Philosophy 13 (2): 498-517. 2012.
    A broad range of behavior is associated with crossmodal perception in the arts. Philosophical explanations of crossmodal perception often make reference to neuroscientific discussions of multisensory integration in selective attention. This research demonstrates that superior colliculus plays a regulative role in attention, integrating unique modality specific visual, auditory, and somatosensory spatial maps into a common spatial framework for action, and that motor skill, emotional salience, an…Read more
  •  75
    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 …Read more
  •  88
    Imagining crawling home: A case study in cognitive science and aesthetics
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3): 407-426. 2010.
    Philosophical accounts of narrative fiction can be loosely divided into two types. Participant accounts argue that some sort of simulation, or 1st person perspective taking plays a critical role in our engagement with narratives. Observer accounts argue to the contrary that we primarily engage narrative fictions from a 3rd person point of view, as either side participants or outside observers. Recent psychological research suggests a means to evaluate this debate. The perception of distance and …Read more
  •  23
    Art, Meaning, and Perception: A Question of Methods for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Art
    British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (4): 443-460. 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 bias…Read more