William Seely,Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Bates College http://www.minervaberkeley.org/conferences/seeing-knowing-vision-knowledge-cognition-and-aesthetics/2014-speakers1/william-seely/ What is it about art that can be so captivating? How is it that we find value in these often odd and abstract objects and events that we call artworks? I suggest that we start with an observation about ordinary perception. Selectivity is a critical issue in ordinary perception. The environment is replete with sensory information. However, only a small subset of this information is salient to our current behavior at a given time and perceptual systems are limited capacity information processing resources. How do we solve this problem? One suggestion is that minimal sets of diagnostic features are sufficient for basic-level categorization in a fast, feedforward cortical sweep of perceptual processing. Feedback from this quick and dirty basic level categorization judgment can then be used to direct attention and bias further sensory processing to task-salient features of the local environment So, why do we find art so engaging? One thought is that artworks are attentional engines. Artists and consumers are engaged in a collaborative back and forth exchange that has produced a variety of different categories art defined by different media and a wide array of artistic styles. We can think of the stylistic devices that define these different categories of art as formal-compositional strategies for directing a consumer's attention to artistically salient features of a work and holding it there. Categories of art, in turn, encode our knowledge of these stylistic devices as recipes for understanding how to skillfully engage with different kinds of artworks and function as attentional filters that constrain how we perceive and evaluate a work. Drawing on Phillipe Schyns' diagnostic framework for object recognition, a biased competition theory of attention, and recent research in affective perception by Moshe Bar, Lisa Barrett, and Luiz Pessoa, I propose a framework for how we might model our engagement with artworks in a range of media work as attentional engines. 2014 Conference on Neuroesthetics - Seeing Knowing: Vision, Knowledge, Cognition, and Aesthetics http://www.minervaberkeley.org Co-sponsored by the School of Optometry and Vision Science Program, University of California Berkeley

Quentin Skinner presented his lecture as the 2008-2009 Una's Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Skinner is Barber Beaumon Chair in the Humanities at Queen Mary College, University of London, and Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of more than 20 books, and his works have been widely translated. Professor Skinner's two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, was named by the Times Literary Supplement in 1996 as one of the hundred most influential books published since the Second World War.