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The purpose of the present volume is to investigate the multifarious aspects of the relation between an artwork (visual, literary, or musical), its objective properties, the meaningful experience of it, and the cognitive skills and acts involved in the latter. Each of these aspects is a genuine and irreducible part of what I here will call the “aesthetic complex,” and each of them thus constitutes an autonomous domain of research or an object of scholarly interest: that certain visual or cognitive capacities are activated in the interaction with aesthetic objects; that the experience of aesthetic objects has a particular phenomenology, either because it is accompanied by an appreciative judgment (or a rewarding feeling) or because it is about a specific kind of object (artful objects); that artful objects have properties that plain objects—natural as well as cultural—do not have; and, finally, that aesthetic objects manifest or represent a meaning in that they give shape to or embody an artistic meaning intention. The psychology, the phenomenology, the ontology, and the semiotics of the artwork each aims to lay down the above characteristics in each their domain, with each their methods.

One of the prominent features of literary reading is a sense of defamiliarization: a passage describing an object, event, or person in the mundane world unexpectedly seems strange, so that the reader is made to pause or slow the pace of reading in order to reflect. In Owen Barfield’s words, such moments seem to come from “a different plane or mode of consciousness” (Poetic diction: a study in meaning. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964, p. 171), and they demonstrate the “unfamiliar” of the artwork discussed by Shklovsky (Art as technique. In: Russian formalist criticism: four essays, eds. and trans. Lemon LT, Reis MJ. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1965, p. 12). I identify several mental processes that help constitute the sense of strangeness and that may contribute distinctive elements to the presence of literariness. I examine the initial moments of the experience of literary reading, those occurring in the first few hundred milliseconds as suggested by studies of EEG waves: these include absence of habituation, the deferral of intention, the thwarting of prototypical feeling, bodily alertness, and the experience of animacy. I then consider some sequential features that guide and shape response on a larger scale, focusing in particular on the processes of feeling and their impact on the reader.

An implicit supposition in literary studies is that ideal readers have unconstrained access to the text. However, we argue instead that the processing of literary narrative must be mediated by the fragmentary and distorted memory of real readers. In the present chapter, we focus on an important determinant of memory: the variation in readers’ mental states during reading. In particular, we identify two prevalent fluctuations that have critical implications for memory and literary appreciation: mind wandering, in which the reader momentarily gives relatively little priority to processing the text; and engagement, in which the reader constructs elaborate and personally meaningful representations of the story world. We describe how the variation in these mental states over the course of reading affects reading processes and determines memory for both text and aesthetic reactions. This analysis is supported by the results of two experiments in which readers’ mental states were probed online during reading.

Analogous to our visual perspective, we also have a temporal perspective spanning beyond the present singular point in time. In literary narratives, the characters in the story have a visual perspective on the represented world whereas the reader has a temporal perspective on the narrative as such. The reader’s temporal perspective is a bit eschewed to the represented visual perspective in that there is a temporal distance between the represented events and the reader’s point of view. This temporal distance can be exploited aesthetically to create a conflict between the representation and the presentation of the literary work of art. In a vein similar to the ‘conflict’ in Husserlian picture consciousness, there is a temporal conflict in reading consciousness that will be discussed here with reference to literary examples from Flaubert and Kafka.

The aesthetic experience with visual art has been shown to occur in two stages. Upon initial exposure to a painting, a viewer spontaneously generates a global impression, or gist, of the work. One’s first impression of a painting includes a sense of its pictorial content, overall structural organization and style, meaningfulness, and an affective reaction to it. When gist information in a painting is deemed to have sufficient interest to an observer, the second stage of aesthetic processing ensues. This consists of directed focal exploration of the image to expand knowledge concerning the work’s compositional features and organization to satisfy cognitive curiosity and to develop aesthetic appreciation of a composition. This chapter presents an overview of research findings that have identified the types of visual properties and semantically related information that collectively lead to the activation of what is labeled a “painting gist” by this author. In addition, the influence of the painting gist response on the focal exploration of paintings is discussed.

Pictures are surfaces. Pictures show surfaces. But what is a theory of perception of surfaces? Surface perception was first mentioned in experimental psychology by Metzger in Ganzfeld experiments in the 1930s. However, it was first offered as a serious concept in perception theory by Alhazen in his (1039). Remarkably, almost no contemporary theory of perception uses the term. To rectify this omission, a theory of surfaces is presented here, suggesting that surface perception occurs in all 8 of vision’s modes. Optical information for the shapes of surfaces is given by the ratio of azimuth to elevation. Flat surfaces such as the ground have a linear to quadratic ratio. Increase the ratio and hills are seen. Decrease it and the surrounds are a bowl. Sudden changes in the ratio indicate changes in slant. Sudden changes in density without changes in the ratio indicate a drop-off. The theory is applied to outline drawing and to the fact that pictures provide two surfaces (the real surface of the picture and the depicted surface). The two surfaces create illusions. Features on the picture surface cannot be seen correctly. The importance of surface perception is its breadth of application. The theory of surface perception shows why pictures taken on the Moon or Mars are as intelligible as terrestrial pictures. Surfaces allow control of action even for creatures that fly in 3D without touching surfaces during flight, such as bats and birds.

There are different senses of the word “beauty.” It may refer to a broad social norm or to an individual psychological experience, what we might call “aesthetic response.” The main contention of this chapter is that common or universal principles need not mandate nor even entail that everyone has the same experience of beauty. To the contrary, research indicates that the factors underlying aesthetic response predict considerable individual diversity. It initially seems that the search for universals of beauty is both hegemonic and falsely homogenizing. However, it is not hegemonic if we are concerned with aesthetic response, rather than social norms. Moreover, a clear understanding of universals does not preclude idiosyncrasy. In fact, when properly formulated, such universals predict and explain individual diversity.

In this chapter I consider one of the necessary conditions for being a novelist, the ability to open up and sustain a fictional world. My approach will draw from psychopathology, phenomenology and neuroscience. Using the phenomenological concept of “multiple realities,” I argue that the novelist is in some ways like and in some ways unlike someone who experiences delusions insofar as the novelist can enter into a sustained engagement with an alternative reality. I suggest, however, that, compared with the delusional subject, the novelist has better control of the mechanisms that allow for this sustained engagement.

The paper tries to clarify the relationship between aesthetic experience and artworks, as well as between cognition and the pleasures of art. Starting with an analytical distinction between aesthetics and art-theory, I propose a psychologically and phylogenetically grounded description of the mental resources on which aesthetic experience draws. After tracing a tentative phylogeny of the cognitive and affective resources defining aesthetic experience, I distinguish three structural components: (a) a marked inflection towards a costly use of mental resources (characterized by costly signaling, attention-driven cognitive dynamics, perceptual learning, attentional overload and divergent cognitive style); (b) a real-time hedonic calculus evaluating the properties of the attentional processing; (c) a bi-directional feedback between attention and hedonic calculus. Finally, the paper discusses the relationship between cognitive fluency and positive aesthetic experiences, arguing that fluency can explain the aesthetic pleasures of art only in conjunction with a second and opposite source of pleasure: curiosity.

The paper considers the phenomenology of aesthetic experience as “twofold” in a sense akin to Wollheim’s (Painting as an art. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1987). However, as regards the perception of artworks proper, the notion of twofoldness needs further specification. In the wake of Wollheim, the philosophy of pictorial representation has addressed the second, ‘configurational’ aspect of twofoldness in rather vague terms without addressing the aesthetic or pictorial function of this correlate of aesthetic perception. I shall talk about such co-awareness as “design-seeing” and assign two decisive properties to pictorial design. First, I will point to a depicting property of design that is a distinctive property of pictures. Design in pictures is such that it can depict two (or, in rare cases, even more) fully consistent objects without the picture becoming ambiguous. Next, I’ll show that the design structure of a painting is not simply a structure in virtue of which something is represented to the eye, but also in virtue of which meaning is conveyed to the eye. If I am right in considering the design level of pictures as a genuine platform for meaning making, then seeing-in doubled with design seeing occurs every time lines and shapes do not only depict, but also mean something