William P. Seeley

Bio: William P. Seeley is an academic researcher from Boston College. The author has contributed to research in topics: Perception & Cognitive neuroscience. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 25 publications receiving 276 citations. Previous affiliations of William P. Seeley include University of New Hampshire & University of New Hampshire at Manchester.

Integrating art historical, psychological, and neuroscientific explanations of artists' advantages in drawing and perception.

Abstract: Art historians, artists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have long asserted that artists perceive the world differently than nonartists. Although empirical research on the nature and correlates of skilled drawing is limited, the available evidence supports this view: artists outperform nonartists on visual analysis and form recognition tasks and their perceptual advantages are correlated with and can be largely accounted for by drawing skill. The authors propose an integrative model to explain these results, derived from research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience on how category knowledge, attention, and motor plans influence visual perception. The authors claim that (a) artists' specialized, declarative knowledge of the structure of objects' appearances and (b) motor priming achieved via proceduralization and practice in an artistic medium both contribute to attention-shifting mechanisms that enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and account for artists' advantages in drawing and visual analysis. Suggestions for testing the model are discussed. Skilled visual artists are able to create convincing representa- tional drawings and paintings; in contrast, realistic rendering is extraordinarily difficult for most nonartists. How can we under- stand this profound disparity? One long-standing explanation is that artists perceive the world differently than nonartists. This view has been espoused by artists (Goldwater & Treves, 1972; Schlewitt-Haynes, Earthman, & Burns, 2002), art instructors (Dodson, 1985; Hale, 1964), art critics and historians (Fry, 1919/ 1981; Gombrich, 1960; Ruskin, 1857/1971), psychologists (Arnheim, 1954; Cohen & Bennett, 1997; Kozbelt, 2001; Mitchell, Ropar, Ackroyd, & Rajendran, 2005), and neuroscientists (Chatterjee, 2004; Livingstone, 2002; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999; Zeki & Lamb, 1994). However, far from resolving the issue, this claim raises a host of additional questions. If the assertion is true, what is the nature of artists' perceptual differences? What mechanisms are involved? How are such differences related to drawing skill? In this article, we attempt to integrate these perspectives into a unified account and offer a provisional explanation of psycholog- ical mechanisms underlying artists' drawing and perceptual abili- ties. Although the psychological basis of skilled drawing remains a relatively neglected area of investigation, the available evidence supports the claim that artists do perceive the world differently, and in some respects better, than nonartists. By better, we mean objectively measurable superior performance on tasks relevant to meaningful computational goals, such as recognizing objects in blurry or otherwise degraded images. We review theoretical per- spectives on artists' perceptual abilities from several disciplines and examine supporting empirical evidence. We then propose an integrative, interdisciplinary model to account for these results. The model is derived from recent research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience on the roles played by category knowledge and motor planning in visual attention and perception. We argue that artists develop attentional strategies that enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field. These strategies operate in two ways: (a) via specialized, declarative knowledge of the "struc- ture of appearances" of objects and scenes and (b) via motor priming achieved through proceduralization and practice of pro- ductive techniques in artistic media. Both of these focus attention on stimulus features relevant for adequate depiction. Because these features are also diagnostic for identifying objects, we argue that artists' attentional strategies account for their perceptual advan- tages as well. We conclude by proposing ways to test the model.

Art, Artists, and Perception: A Model for Premotor Contributions to Perceptual Analysis and Form Recognition

Abstract: 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 that is derived from a diagnostic framework for object recognition and recent research in cognitive neuroscience on selective visual attention. This research demonstrates that endogenous shifts of visual attention enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and inhibit the perception of potential distracters. Moreover, it demonstrates complementary roles for spatial schemata and motor plans in visual attention. We argue that artists develop novel spatial schemata, which enable them to recognize an...

Naturalizing aesthetics: art and the cognitive neuroscience of vision

Abstract: Recent advances in our 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. Artists’ formal methods are a means to cull the structural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from a dense flux of sensory information in conscious experience. Therefore he interpreted artists’ formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception, and art as a field whose interests 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...

Art and Science: A Philosophical Sketch of Their Historical Complexity and Codependence

Abstract: To analyze the relations between art and science, philosophers and historians have developed different lines of inquiry. A first type of inquiry considers how artistic and scientific practices have interacted over human history. Another project aims to determine the contributions (if any) that scientific research can make to our understanding of art, including the contributions that cognitive science can make to philosophical questions about the nature of art. We rely on contributions made to these projects in order to demonstrate that art and science are codependent phenomena. Specifically, we explore the codependence of art and science in the context of a historical analysis of their interactions and in the context of contemporary debates on the cognitive science of art.

The descent of man and selection in relation to sex

Abstract: ION, GENERAL CONCEPTIONS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, MENTAL INDIVIDUALITY. It would be very difficult for any one with even much more knowledge than I possess, to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of these high mental powers. This difficulty arises from the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal; and again, the fact that writers differ to a great extent in the meaning which they attribute to the above terms, causes a further difficulty. If one may judge from various articles which have been published lately, the greatest stress seems to be laid on the supposed entire absence in animals of the power of abstraction, or of forming general concepts. But when a dog sees another dog at a distance, it is often clear that he perceives that it is a dog in the abstract; for when he gets nearer his whole manner suddenly changes, if the other dog be a friend. A recent writer remarks, that in all such cases it is a pure assumption to assert that the mental act is not essentially of the same nature in the animal as in man. If either refers what he perceives with his senses to a mental concept, then so do both. (44. Mr. Hookham, in a letter to Prof. Max Muller, in the 'Birmingham News,' May, 1873.) When I say to my terrier, in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi, hi, where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all around, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scent for any game, but finding nothing, she looks up into any neighbouring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly shew that she had in her mind a general idea or concept that some animal is to be discovered and hunted? It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth. But how can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures or pains in the chase? And this would be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Buchner (45. 'Conferences sur la Theorie Darwinienne,' French translat. 1869, p. 132.) has remarked, how little can the hardworked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence. It is generally admitted, that the higher animals possess memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason. If these powers, which differ much in different animals, are capable of improvement, there seems no great improbability in more complex faculties, such as the higher forms of abstraction, and selfconsciousness, etc., having been evolved through the development and combination of the simpler ones. It has been urged against the views here maintained that it is impossible to say at what point in the ascending scale animals become capable of abstraction, etc.; but who can say at what age this occurs in our young children? We see at least that such powers

The Conscious Mind

Abstract: Susan Goethel Campbell’s exhibition Field Guide explores the nature of art and the conceptual process through a multimedia installation that also reflects upon temporality, art history, ecology and science. Introduced with a time-lapse video of weather patterns captured by web cam over the course of an entire year, atmospheric effects assume the quality of translucent washes that blur distinctions between opacity and transparency, painting and technology. Aerial views of built environments set against expansive cityscapes present essential imagery for large-format digital woodblock prints realized in monochromatic tonals and saturated grids of yellow and blazing orange. Some combine undulating wood grain patterns with pinhole perforations to admit light; others consist of diaphanous walnut stains applied to hand-crafted paper, a self-referential allusion to art’s planarity and permeable membrane. The evanescence of these views is echoed in pristine impressions of filtered dust and shimmering milkweed assemblages contained in Plexiglas light boxes. Known as Asclepias, milkweed is an herbaceous flower named by Carl Linnaeus after Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, due to its efficacious medicinal powers. Like the weather, the milkweed’s reflective silver filaments respond to shifting currents of air paired with gently wafted treetops projected in the viewing room. Here pearls of light corresponding to the spheres and pinpricks of the prints on the walls float randomly over the fictitious frame of a cubical vitrine. Orbs appear and disappear amid nocturnal shadows as figments of the imagination, their languid dispersion eliciting not-ofthis-world sensations of suspension, ascent and transcendence. This joined to the mesmerizing stillness of a gallery pierced occasionally by the sound of supersonic aircraft, a reminder of the machine in the garden. Beyond, the history of landscape photography and the Romantic sublime are encoded in works titled “Old Stand” that render minuscule figures of stationary box photographers against the grandeur of ice-capped Rockies. In some of the works the human figure is effaced as a historical memory through exquisitely modulated rubbings whose unbounded spatiality contrasts with the reflexive interiority of the viewing room. Campbell’s incandescent vision of nature asserts the phenomenal power of art to elevate the human spirit in the presence of heart-stirring beauty. It dares to reaffirm the timeless union between the material and immaterial substance of the universe, between human life and the ephemera of the natural world. f i l m

The artful mind meets art history: toward a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation.

Abstract: Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework.