Keynote Speakers Presentations
(click on title for partial video recordings)
Date: 24 February, 2023 Time: 4pm Venue: Hora Conference Room
Dr Ronald Hübner, Professor Emeritus
Institute of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Germany
Beauty is a line: aspects of line aesthetics
Lines of various kind play an important role in design, art, and science. A common use is to depict objects. Early line drawings of objects date back more than 30.000 years and, therefore, stand at the beginning of prehistoric art. Interestingly, we can recognize objects outlined in drawings although the lines are absent in real objects. This indicates that neurophysiological mechanisms have been evolved to extract contours for the economical processing and storage of relevant object information. Nevertheless, in most genres of art, and especially in art theory they hardly played any role until the Renaissance. Only from the mid-Cinquecento contour lines were defined. The German artist and theorist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was the first who distinguished different line types. However, it took more than another one hundred years until the British artist and theorist William Hogarth (1697-1764) for the first time attributed different degrees of beauty to different line types. Moreover, he directed the focus to the curvature of lines. Accordingly, his book ‘The Analysis of Beauty’ (1753) can be regarded as the beginning of line aesthetics. Hogarth’s ideas have had a persistently strong influence in many areas of art and design. Another important development for line aesthetics was the paradigm shift from mimesis (nature imitation) to a reception-oriented theory of art in the 18th century, which emphasized the relationship between the artwork and the viewer and increased the interest in the formal properties of an artwork responsible for effects on art appreciation beyond object representation. As a result of this development, lines, their curvature, and their aesthetic value have played an increasingly important role. Fortunately, today we have a wide range of methods for their analysis and empirical study.
Date: 23 February, 2023 Time: 11am Venue: Hora Conference Room
Professor Claus-Christian Carbon
Department of General Psychology and Methodology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
Research Group EPÆG (Ergonomics, Psychological Æsthetics, Gestalt), Bamberg, Germany
Bamberg Graduate School of Affective and Cognitive Sciences (BaGrACS), Bamberg, Germany
About the need for a solid and valid theoretical fundament to conduct future aesthetics studies
We live in times when neuroscientific methods have become standard methods that many researchers can easily use. While these modern methods offer great opportunities to understand brain activities linked with aesthetic processing, we face the problem of using sophisticated techniques without a proper and valid theoretical foundation of aesthetics. A further problem arises from sophisticated methods often demanding strict constraints in presenting and experiencing aesthetic stimuli. Especially in the field of art experience where context factors, dynamic effects and social and situational affordances are essential in triggering a true and deep “Kunsterlebnis” (experience of art), such methodological constraints often make ecologically valid processes impossible. Along with these problems, we often have to focus on the aesthetic stimulus as the major object of research, forgetting that the psychologically relevant processes induced by the perception of the object, not the object as such, are the processes we should primarily cover, capture, describe, and analyze. I will propose a dynamic and holistic aesthetic perspective that includes the respective context, situation, cognitive and affective traits and state of the beholder, ongoing processes of understanding and Zeitgeist and other cultural factors. When ignoring such factors, we won’t understand the qualia of aesthetics as we will primarily focus on particular aspects, such as the momentary assessment of aesthetic qualities based on simple and stereotypical shortcuts, which only add minor clarifications to the needed understanding of aesthetic processing.
Date: 24 February, 2023 Time: 5.30pm Venue: Hora Conference Room
Dr Marco Bertamini
Department of General Psychology, Visual Perception Lab, University of Padova, Italy
Is symmetry a clear case of an aesthetic primitive?
Across the centuries, and across disciplines, we have many examples of interest in symmetry. It is a fascination that brings together science and art. In terms of theories of aesthetics, Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) list symmetry as one of eight key principles, and Reber et al. (2004) use it to illustrate the role of fluency in aesthetics. Psychophysics and more recently neuroscience has confirmed that the human visual system is sensitive to symmetry. Detection is fast and efficient, and there is activation in a network of visual areas that is automatically generated every time that symmetry is present in the image (Bertamini et al., 2018). Given these premises, symmetry lends itself as a unique candidate to be an aesthetic primitive, defined by Latto as a stimulus that resonates with the mechanisms of the visual system (1995). It is also a candidate to illustrate the relationship between aesthetics and efficient coding (Redies, 2008). Many studies have confirmed the role of symmetry in aesthetics, and in perception of beauty (e.g. for human faces, Rhodes et al., 1998). There are, however, some complications to this story. Reflectional symmetry is special for the visual system, despite similar mathematical properties to other types of symmetry; symmetry does not pop out in a visual scene, and experts often claim not to like symmetry (Weichselbaum et al., 2018). Comparing explicit and implicit measures, and studying preferences across many classes of stimuli, we see that affective responses to symmetry are not a reflex (an automatic response), despite the fact that brain processing of symmetry is automatic. However, symmetry is strongly associated with positive valence, and this is true for most individuals independently of expertise. Overall, symmetry is a good candidate for an aesthetics primitive if we relax the definition and accept that the link between perceptual responses and aesthetics experiences may bypass awareness, but it is nevertheless indirect.
Date: 23 February, 2023 Time: 4pm Venue: Hora Conference Room
Dr Claudia Muth
Psychology of Design, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, Halle, Germany
Insightful instabilities. The dynamics of an aesthetic encounter
We take a closer look at a puzzling image, choose a new path through a familiar space, or enjoy the suspense of a harmonic resolution while listening to music. Perception is explorative, embodied, and predictive; it emerges dynamically from the individually and socially shaped entanglement of mind, body and material. Whereas such processes of active sense-making seem to aim at semantic stability, we sometimes expose ourselves to (or even produce) objects and situations that challenge perception or offer a variety of possible meanings. When we encounter an object in an unfamiliar context or when we become aware of an irresolvable ambiguity, we might get a glimpse into our own habitual ways of sense-making. This talk will address the affective dynamics of these “Semantic Instabilities” when experiencing multistability, dichotomy, perceptual indeterminacy, delayed recognition, disorder or ambivalence. Whereas people generally seem to prefer predictable, determinate and ordered objects and situations, means of perceptual disruption in art and design can sometimes be rewarding ways to investigate ourselves. Experiencing these insightful instabilities can motivate intense engagement which, however, does not necessarily resolve the instabilities. Instead, the engagement might even reveal new ambiguities or integrate incompatible elements. This apparent contradiction between our need for stability and our interest in instability is resolvable if we cautiously acknowledge that we might sometimes be driven by the open-ended activity of sense-making itself rather than by the resolution of Semantic Instability.
Date: 23 February, 2023 Time: 5.30pm Venue: Hora Conference Room
Prof Christer Johansson & Prof Per Olav Folgerø
University of Bergen, Norway
Multimodal entrainment; symmetry breaking and change blindness
Face perception shows persistent attribution of beauty, trust and intelligence related to facial symmetry. We present results from sorting faces for attractiveness or trustworthiness and relate the findings to gender, symmetry and symmetry breaking. Are beautiful faces trustworthy, or does beauty come with a price? The two conditions (like or trust) are demonstrably different. Although correlated, trustworthiness increases with (slight) deviation from symmetry, whereas attractiveness follows symmetry closer (Sofer et al., 2015). Trustworthiness takes longer time to evaluate, indicating more cognitive effort (Christoff & Gabrieli, 2000, cf. Chenier & Winkielman, 2009). Beauty, on the other hand, is judged faster, in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (Kawabata & Zeki, 2004; Isizhu & Zeki, 2011). A second experiment investigated if watching art affected a simple linguistic task – auditory instructions for pressing a left or a right button, presented in a simple or a complex version. The participants were then tested for recognizing changes in the pictures they had been exposed to. After accounting for learning effects, we found that most participants exhibited change blindness. People who were good at detecting visual changes showed different sensitivities to the linguistic instructions. The indication is that interaction between visual processing and linguistic processing as well as and judgements of social attributes exhibit significant individual differences. Aesthetic experience may affect brain activation positively. Increased brain entropy (cf., Friston, 2010) has been related to general intelligence, and one way to increase entropy lies in cross-modal activation through the networks of rich nodes. Aesthetic experience may be functional when investigating novel associations.
References
Chenier, T. & Winkielman, P. 2009. The Origins of Aesthetic Pleasure: Processing Fluency and Affect in Judgment, Body and the Brain, in M. Skov, & O. Vartanian (Eds.), Neuroaestetics, Amityville, New York, 261-294.
Christoff, K., & Gabrieli, J.D.E. 2000. The frontopolar cortex and human cognition: Evidence for a rostrocaudal hierarchical organization within the human prefrontal cortex. Psychobiology 28, 168–186. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03331976
Friston, K. 2010. The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nat Rev Neurosci 11, 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787
Izhizu, T. & Zeki, S. 2011. Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty, PLoS ONE 6(7): e21852. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852.
Kawabata, H. & Zeki, S. 2004. Neural Correlates of Beauty, Journal of Neurophysiology 91, 2004, 1699-1705. http://jn.physiology.org/content/91/4.toc
Sofer, C.; Dotsch, R; Wigboldus, D. H. J. & Todorov, A. 2014. What Is Typical Is Good: The Influence of Face Typicality on Perceived Trustworthiness, Psychological Science, 2015, Vol. 26(1) 39–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614554955.