This book is about aesthetic processes and play from the perspectives of psychologists, philosophers, and semiologists. They explore the underlying processes from many viewpoints, including the prehistoric roots of language and art; the historical evolution of artistic, literary, and musical styles; the structure of artworks from both gestalt and semiotic perspectives; the biological and psychological processes underlying production and appreciation; the appeal of sentimental art; emotional responses to art and other aesthetic forms; personality in relation to artistic style; the testing (...) and measurement of art-related skills; the relations between social life and literary understanding; literature in relation to media; as well as neurobiological, developmental and individual growth perspectives on play activity. (shrink)

Neuroaesthetics tends not to do literature. To put it more precisely, neuroaesthetics tends not to do literature very often and when it does, it is inclined not to do it with much conviction, belief and rigour. This is not the case in the very many impressive studies that have been conducted on the neuroaesthetics of sister arts such as painting, music, dance, sculpture and the like. Why is this the case and, of greater importance, how can it best be resolved? (...) In this paper, the pitfalls, parameters and prospects of a neuroaesthetics of prose fiction will be explored. The article itself is part critical review, part methodological proposal and part opinion paper. Its aim is simple: to stimulate, excite and energize thinking in the discipline as to how prose fiction might be fully integrated in the canon of neuroaesthetics. (shrink)

Indeterminate art invokes a perceptual dilemma in which apparently detailed and vivid images resist identification. We used event-related fMRI to study visual perception of representational, indeterminate and abstract paintings. We hypothesized increased activation along a gradient of posterior-to-anterior ventral visual areas with increased object resolution, and postulated that object resolution would be associated with visual imagery. Behaviorally, subjects were faster to recognize familiar objects in representational than in both indeterminate and abstract paintings. We found activation within a distributed cortical network (...) that includes visual, parietal, limbic and prefrontal regions. Representational paintings, which depict scenes cluttered with familiar objects, evoked stronger activation than indeterminate and abstract paintings in higher-tier visual areas. Perception of scrambled paintings was associated with imagery-related activation in the precuneus and prefrontal cortex. Finally, representational paintings evoked stronger activation than indeterminate paintings in the temporoparietal junction. Our results suggest that perception of familiar content in art works is mediated by object recognition, memory recall and mental imagery, cognitive processes that evoke activation within a distributed cortical network. (shrink)

Biophilia is Edward O. Wilson's most personal book, an evocation of his own response to nature and an eloquent statement of the conservation ethic. Wilson argues that our natural affinity for life―biophilia―is the very essence of our humanity and binds us to all other living species.

Elements of Episodic Memory is a classic text in the psychology literature. It had a significant influence on research in the area has been much sought after in recent years. Finally, it has now been made available again with this reissue, the text unchanged from the original.

In his new book, eminent psychologist - Daniel Stern, explores the hitherto neglected topic of 'vitality'. Truly a tour de force from a brilliant clinician and scientist, Forms of Vitality is a profound and absorbing book - one that will be essential reading for psychologists, psychotherapists, and those in the creative arts.

We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study (...) of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties. (shrink)