William Seeley

Recent advances in out 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. Artist’s formal methods are a means to cull the structural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from the dense flux of sensory information in conscious experience. therefore, he interpreted artist’s formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception. Art was a field whose interests coincidentally overlapped with aesthetics. In what follows I examine three approaches to cognitive science and aesthetics that rest on a tacit assumption of Baumgarten’s program. I argue that whereas this new research can explain how viewers perceptually recover the content of artworks, it does not explain what makes those works 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 Baumgarten’s original definition of aesthetics that treats attention to the way the formal structure of an artwork works to 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. I conclude that it remains an open question whether this research can contribute to philosophical aesthetics.

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 art and nonart objects and events. Therefore these explanations fail to disambiguate artworks from other things. They fail to locate art. This observation points to a deeper problem. What interests us in art is how what we perceive has been used to show us what the work represents. Our understanding of art is governed by a range of productive and evaluative normative conventions that govern how we ought to look at a work and evaluate how it was made. The normative dimension of appreciation argument suggests that these aspects of our engagement with artworks lie outside the scope of neuroscientific explanations of art. This chapter provides a sketch of a diagnostic recognition framework for engaging art that resolves both problems and helps explains how artworks function within the social institution of the artworld to facilitate a communicative exchange between artists and consumers.

Recent interdisciplinary research in visual stylometry employs digital image analysis algorithms to study the image features and statistics that underwrite our experience of artworks. This research brings psychologists, computer scientists, and art historians together to explore the formal image qualities that define artistic style. We introduce the field of visual stylometry, discuss it's implications for our understanding of both the nature of categories of art and the role artistic style plays in our engagement with artworks. We then discuss the results of our research employing entropy analyses and discrete tonal analyses to classify paintings by school (Impressionism/Hudson River School) and medium/technique (Wyeth/egg-tempura/watercolor).

The olfactory system was traditionally thought to lack a thalamic relay to mediate top-down influences from memory and attention in other perceptual modalities. Olfactory perception was therefore often described as an outlier among perceptual modalities. It was argued as a result that olfaction was a canonical example of a direct perception. In this paper we review functional and anatomical evidence which demonstrates that olfaction depends on both direct pathway connecting anterior piriform cortex to orbitofrontal cortex and an indirect thalamic circuit connecting posterior piriform cortex and orbitofrontal cortices to the olfactory system. We argue that the indirect corticothalamic circuit has the structure to potentially mediate mediates top-down influences of memory and attention in olfactory perception. This suggests that olfaction is not an outlier after all.