Imagining Crawling Home: A Case Study in Cognitive Science and Aesthetics

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 slope is influenced by the energetic (e.g., task difficulty) and emotional (e.g., anxiety) costs of actions. These effects are limited to increases in the costs of actions agents intend to perform themselves, generalize to cases where participants imagine acting, and demonstrate a role for tacit motor simulation in action planning. If participant accounts are sound, one should, therefore, find similar effects across changes in the interpretation of the costs of actions depicted in static images. We asked people to copy the rough spatial layout of two paintings across different interpretations of the costs of the actions they depicted. We predicted that increasing costs would cause participants to draw distances as longer and hills as steeper. Our results confirm this prediction for the energetic, but not the emotional, costs of actions. Visual perception is not solely a visual process. What one sees in the world is influenced not only by optical and ocular-motor information, but also by one’s purposes, physiological state, and emotions. (Proffitt 2006, p. 110). Rev.Phil.Psych. DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0031-2 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2009, the 20th Congress of the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics, Chicago, IL, August 2008, the 19th Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Washington, D.C., May 2007, and Aesthetic Psychology, University of Durham, Durham, England, September 2007. Special thanks to Fred Owens, Meredith Bashaw, and my student research assistants Jessica Waughtel, Erica Ofeldt, and Angelica Appel. W. P. Seeley (*) Department of Philosophy, Bates College, 73/75 Campus Avenue, Lewiston, ME 04240, USA e-mail: [email protected] The general attitude towards empirical research in philosophical aesthetics has softened considerably in recent years. However, significant work is needed to clarify exactly what contribution cognitive science can make to the philosophy of art and aesthetics. It has been argued elsewhere that research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience can help us understand how particular artworks generate artistically salient effects (e.g., aesthetic effects and semantic associations constitutive of an artifact’s status as an artwork) (Carroll et al. forthcoming). For instance, it is often asserted that the aesthetic quality of the Mona Lisa lies in Leonardo’s use of sfumato to render the dynamics of the depicted facial expression. Margaret Livingstone (2000) has demonstrated that these perceptual effects emerge from differences in the acuity of foveal and peripheral vision. Livingstone’s discussion does not establish that the target sfumato contours are aesthetic features of the painting. However, it does lend support to a standard art critical interpretation of the painting. This type of data can, in turn, be used to evaluate whether competing theories are consistent with the psychological processes underlying our engagement with artworks. In what follows we present a case study to illustrate this model for the contribution of cognitive science to philosophical aesthetics. Why are we frightened by the fictional events in horror movies, gripped by the formulaic plots of dime store mystery novels, and moved by the plights of fictional characters depicted on the stage. We understand that none of these events or characters are real. Our responses to narrative fictions are, as a result, perplexing. Theoretical approaches to these and other questions about the nature of narrative engagement can be loosely divided into two types, participant and observer accounts, distinguished by the relative role they attribute to imagination, simulation, and perspective taking in narrative understanding and appreciation. Proponents of participant accounts argue that first-person perspective taking plays a central role in narrative understanding, or, that in the course of coming to understand a novel, play, film, or narrative picture, readers and spectators adopt the perspectives of depicted characters and imagine, or simulate, a range of their thoughts, affective states, and actions from a first person point of view (Currie 1995; Giovannelli 2008). Observer accounts argue, to the contrary, that spectators and readers need not ordinarily call on any further resources than their prior knowledge of event types and the relationship between beliefs, desires, and behavior to recover the content of a narrative (Carroll 1997/2001; Kieran 2003). Critically, simulation and perspective sharing do not play significant roles in observer accounts. Rather, proponents argue that when we engage with narrative artworks we adopt the third person perspective of an observer (e.g., either an observer outside the narrative or a side-participant to the events depicted). The question at the root of this debate is, therefore, whether, and if so to what 1 The distinction between participants and observers is borrowed from Carroll (1997/2001). This distinction roughly tracks the distinction between participant and onlooker accounts in Giovannelli (2008). In these contexts narrative understanding refers to the capacity to recognize the elements of the actions and events depicted in a narrative (e.g., the capacity to recognize a character as of a type with a particular set of goals, motives, and affective states). Narrative appreciation is less sharply defined. It is sometimes equated with a deep understanding of what it is like to be a character with a range of beliefs, goals, or affective states. Roughly narrative appreciation refers to our capacity to make sense of the events depicted in a narrative in a way that renders the behavior of characters as compelling, or necessitated by their goals, beliefs, and character traits (Kieran 2003; Neill 1996). W.P. Seeley