Psych of Visual Function/Art

(4 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The goal of psychology is to understand how psychological experiences and behaviour derive from underlying mental representations and processes, and how these, in turn, derive from biological substrates. The creation and viewing of artistic objects is a human activity that has existed since prehistoric times, pointing to the fundamental importance of aesthetic experience in human psychology. A scientific understanding of aesthetics and artistic behaviour is therefore a key component of the complete science of the human mind. While aesthetics is an aspect that we need to understand in its own right, the processes and products of art and design can additionally help provide windows to more basic aspects of perceptual and cognitive processes underlying the human mind. Art, or more generally, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic artefacts, engages many important components of psychology including visual perception, memory, motor control, decision making, emotion and social/cultural development. In this module we will examine progress in this relatively recent scientific field.