Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
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).
See Seeley and Kozbelt (2008) for a discussion of the relationship between motor simulation, attention, and perception.
A motor program specifies the kinematics and dynamics of a particular movement (i.e., the spatial features of a movement, the angles through which joints will move, and the forces required to move the joints). Complex motor programs are constructed from movement primitives, or schema that encode elemental joint movements with stereotyped spatial and temporal characteristics (Kandel et al. 2000).
Research on perspective taking in social neuroscience demonstrates that simulations of the beliefs and affective states of others are underwritten by similar processes, that play a similar role in our ability to understand and predict the behavior of others, and draw on the same sets of premotor and somatosensory areas (see Decety and Grèzes 2006, for a review).
It is important to note that this is not a theory-theory account of character engagement (Carroll 1997/2001). The claim is simply that no mediating mental reconstruction of a character’s experience is needed to understand and appreciate the events and actions depicted in a narrative.
See above, p. 3. Emotional costs of actions cause agents to scale their actions to avoid perceived risks related to general fears (e.g., fear of heights) or dangerous environmental conditions (e.g., anxiety about descending a steep slope on a skateboard).
See retrieved August 31, 2008: http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A6464&page_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1
See retrieved August 31, 2008: http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=c&a=p&ID=1239
I am perennially surprised by the number of students and colleagues who tell me they never noticed that Christina Olsen is depicted as disabled, or realized that she is depicted crawling home, and so never really understood the psychological dimension of the painting. This type of naïve misperception of the work is reflected in a June 30, 2006 Letter to the Editor from the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal. The writer described the paintings in the Wyeth retrospective at The Philadelphia Museum of Art as celebrations of rural American life which symbolize the same kind of moral virtues as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post paintings. It is also supported by survey data from our study. 91% (51/56) of participants described Christina Olsen as lying in the field in surveys completed after their first drawings (i.e. prior to the introduction of biographical information), and only one participant spontaneously described Christina Olsen as suffering from psychological distress (i.e. “lying, upset, helpless”). Likewise only 7% (2/28) describe the subject of Winter, 1946 as exhibiting psychological distress prior to the introduction of biographical information.
See retrieved August 31, 2008: http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=15617
See Corn 1973, p. 100.
We used a Bonferroni adjusted alpha level of 0.017 (0.05/3) for each of the analyses of the energetic costs results.
Optimality models seek to explain adaptations in terms of cost/benefit tradeoffs that would yield the maximum benefit to an individual.
References
Buccino, G., L. Riggio, G. Melli, F. Binkofski, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti. 2005. Listening to action-related sentences modulates the activity of the motor system: a combined TMS and behavioral study. Cognitive Brain Research 24: 355–363.
Carroll, N. 1997/2001. Simulation, emotions, and morality. Beyond aesthetics, 306–317. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001.
Carroll, N., M. Moore, and W.P. Seeley. forthcoming. The philosophy of art and aesthetics, psychology, and neuroscience: studies in literature, visual arts, and music. In Aesthetic science: Connecting minds, brains, and experience, ed. A.P. Shimamura and S.E. Palmer. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, D.J. 2005. Look little, look often: the influence of gaze frequency on drawing accuracy. Perception & Psychophysics 67(6): 997–1009.
Corn, W.M. 1973. The art of Andrew Wyeth. Boston: The New York Graphic Society.
Currie, G. 1995. Image and mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Decety, J., and J. Grèzes. 2006. The power of simulation: imagining one’s own and other’s behavior. Brain Research 1079: 4–14.
Giovannelli, A. 2008. In and out: the dynamics of imagination in the engagement with narratives. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66(1): 11–24.
Glenberg, A.M., and M.P. Kaschak. 2002. Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9(3): 558–565.
Goldman, A.I. 2006. Simulating minds: the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gopnik, A., and H. Wellman. 1992. Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. Mind and Language 7: 145–171.
Haggard, P. 2008. Human volition: towards a neuroscience of the will. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9(12): 934–946.
Kandel, E.R., J.H. Schwartz, and T.M. Jessell. 2000. Principles of neural science. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kieran, M. 2003. In search of a narrative. In Imagination, philosophy, and the arts, ed. M. Kieran and D.M. Lopes, 69–87. New York: Routledge.
Krebs, J.R., and N.B. Davies. 1987. An introduction to behavioral ecology. Boston: Blackwell Scientific Publications.
Livingstone, M. 2000. Is it warm? Is it real? Or just low spatial frequency? Science 290: 1299.
Neill, A. 1996. Empathy in (film) fiction. In Post-theory, ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll, 175–194. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Nichols, S., and S.P. Stich. 2003. Mindreading: an integrated account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding other minds. New York: Oxford University Press.
Proffitt, D.R. 2006. Embodied perception and the economy of action. Psychological Science 1(2): 110–122.
Schubotz, R.I., and D.Y. Von Cramon. 2003. Functional-anatomical concepts of human premotor cortex: evidence from fMRI and PET studies. Neuroimage 20: 120–131.
Schyns, P. 1998. Diagnostic recognition: task constraints, object information, and their interactions. Cognition 67(2): 147–180.
Seeley, W.P., and A. Kozbelt. 2008. Art, artists, and perception: a model for premotor contributions to perceptual analysis and form recognition. Philosophical Psychology 21(2): 149–171.
Speer, N.K., J.R. Reynolds, K.M. Swallow, and J.M. Zacks. 2009. Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experiences. Psychological Science 20(8): 989–999.
Stefanucci, J.K., D.R. Proffitt, G.L. Clore, and N. Parekh. 2008. Skating down a steeper slope: fear influences the perception of geographical slant. Perception 37(2): 321–323.
Tassinary, L.G., J.T. Cacioppo, and E.J. Vanman. 2007. The skeletomotor system: surface electromyography. In Handbook of electrophysiology, ed. J.T. Cacioppo, L.G. Tassinary, and G.G. Berntson, 267–299. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Witt, J.K., and D.R. Proffitt. 2008. Action-specific influences on distance perception: a role for motor simulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 34(6): 1479–1492.
Witt, J.K., D.R. Proffitt, and W. Epstein. 2004. Perceiving distance: a role of effort and intent. Perception 33: 577–590.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
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.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Seeley, W.P. Imagining Crawling Home: A Case Study in Cognitive Science and Aesthetics. Rev.Phil.Psych. 1, 407–426 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0031-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0031-2