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Aesthetic perception, attention, and non-genericity: How artists exploit the automatisms of perception to construct meaning in vision

Aesthetic perception, attention, and non-genericity: How artists exploit the automatisms of... AbstractThe present work is an attempt to bring meaning to the fore of not only empirical aesthetics but also experimental aesthetics. We have addressed meaning in terms of attention-grabbing perceptual structure, doing so in the strong sense of structure; i.e., structure understood as a pure spatial relation between shapes, independently of what objects these shapes represent. The structures we investigate are the so-called non-generic configurations that obtain between objects seen from a unique vantage point. In the paper, we first introduce the notion of non-genericity, in general, and its use in visual art in particular, where it is claimed to affect the visual brain as an attention grabber. We then present an experiment we have designed to test the effect of such a relation on the visual brain, and we give evidence to the effect that non-generic configurations in pictures do attract attention significantly more than their generic counterparts. Non-genericity can therefore be considered as one among other pictorial techniques artists dispose of to construct perceptual meaning in vision. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cognitive Semiotics de Gruyter

Aesthetic perception, attention, and non-genericity: How artists exploit the automatisms of perception to construct meaning in vision

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References (67)

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2235-2066
eISSN
2235-2066
DOI
10.1515/cogsem-2017-0011
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThe present work is an attempt to bring meaning to the fore of not only empirical aesthetics but also experimental aesthetics. We have addressed meaning in terms of attention-grabbing perceptual structure, doing so in the strong sense of structure; i.e., structure understood as a pure spatial relation between shapes, independently of what objects these shapes represent. The structures we investigate are the so-called non-generic configurations that obtain between objects seen from a unique vantage point. In the paper, we first introduce the notion of non-genericity, in general, and its use in visual art in particular, where it is claimed to affect the visual brain as an attention grabber. We then present an experiment we have designed to test the effect of such a relation on the visual brain, and we give evidence to the effect that non-generic configurations in pictures do attract attention significantly more than their generic counterparts. Non-genericity can therefore be considered as one among other pictorial techniques artists dispose of to construct perceptual meaning in vision.

Journal

Cognitive Semioticsde Gruyter

Published: Nov 27, 2017

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