Still Moving

Here is something puzzling. Still Lifes can be expressive. Expression involves movement. Hence, (some) Still Lifes move. This seems odd. I consider a novel explanation to this ‘static-dynamic’ puzzle from Mitchell Green (2007). Green defends an analysis of artistic expressivity that is heavily indebted to work on intermodal perception. He says visual stimuli, like colours and shapes, can elicit experienced resemblances to sounds, smells and feelings. This enables viewers to know how an emotion feels by looking at the picture. The hypothesis is intriguing, but I show that his suggestion that we empathize with the pictorial content is implausible and that this exposes a flaw in the way his argument moves from experiential mappings to experiential-affective mappings. Consequently, I register some reservations about the way Green supposes we detect these cross-modal qualities

Body perception in newborns

Body ownership and awareness has recently become an active topic of research in adults using paradigms such as the “rubber hand illusion” and “enfacement” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11]. These studies show that visual, tactile, postural, and anatomical information all contribute to the sense of body ownership in adults [12]. While some hypothesize body perception from birth [13], others have speculated on the importance of postnatal experience [14 and 15]. Through studying body perception in newborns, we can directly investigate the factors involved prior to significant postnatal experience. To address this issue, we measured the looking behavior of newborns presented with visual-tactile synchronous and asynchronous cues, under conditions in which the visual information was either an upright (body-related stimulus; experiment 1) or inverted (non-body-related stimulus; experiment 2) infant face. We found that newborns preferred to look at the synchronous condition compared to the asynchronous condition, but only when the visual stimulus was body related. These results are in line with findings from adults and demonstrate that human newborns detect intersensory synchrony when related to their own bodies, consistent with the basic processes underlying body perception being present at birth

A Dynamic Duo: Emotion and Development (Commentary on M.D. Lewis, A Dynamic Systems Approach to Emotion)

A dynamic systems (DS) approach uncovers important connections between emotion and neurophysiology. It is critical, however, to include a developmental perspective. Strides in the understanding of emotional development, as well as the present use of DS in developmental science, add significantly to the study of emotion. Examples include stranger fear during infancy, intermodal perception of emotion, and development of individual emotional systems

Agent familiarity and emotional context influence the everyday empathic responding of young children with autism

Whereas research addressing empathy in ASD tends to employ pencil-and-paper and lab-based behavioural methods, the current study is novel in eliciting parent-report data regarding everyday empathy, sampling various emotional situations regularly encountered by children. Parents of typically-developing children and children diagnosed with ASD and DS completed the newly-developed Day-to-Day Child Empathy Questionnaire. Analysis of descriptions of their children’s responses to the various empathy-inducing situations supports the notion of an empathy deficit in ASD, confirming previous laboratory-based findings. However, important moderation effects were also demonstrated, for both control and clinical groups. In particular, parents reported children in all groups to be more likely to respond empathically to a familiar agent. The nature of children’s responses also according to the specific emotional context

Taking Synchrony Seriously: A Perceptual-Level Model of Infant Synchrony Detection

Synchrony detection between different sensory and/or motor channels appears critically important for young infant learning and cognitive development. For example, empirical studies demonstrate that audio-visual synchrony aids in language acquisition. In this paper we compare these infant studies with a model of synchrony detection based on the Hershey and Movellan (2000) algorithm augmented with methods for quantitative synchrony estimation. Four infant-model comparisons are presented, using audio-visual stimuli of increasing complexity. While infants and the model showed learning or discrimination with each type of stimuli used, the model was most successful with stimuli comprised of one audio and one visual source, and also with two audio sources and a dynamic-face visual motion source. More difficult for the model were stimuli conditions with two motion sources, and more abstract visual dynamics—an oscilloscope instead of a face. Future research should model the developmental pathway of synchrony detection. Normal audio-visual synchrony detection in infants may be experience-dependent (e.g., Bergeson, et al., 2004)

Detection of Modality-Specific Properties in Unimodal and Bimodal Events during Prenatal Development

Predictions of the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis (IRH) state that early in development information presented to a single sense modality (unimodal) selectively recruits attention to and enhances perceptual learning of modality-specific properties of stimulation at the expense of amodal properties, while information presented redundantly across two or more modalities (bimodal) results in enhanced perceptual learning of amodal properties. The present study explored these predictions during prenatal development by assessing bobwhite quail embryos’ detection of pitch, a modality-specific property, under conditions of unimodal and redundant bimodal stimulation. Chicks’ postnatal auditory preferences between the familiarized call and the same call with altered pitch were assessed following hatching. Unimodally-exposed chicks significantly preferred the familiarized call over the pitch-modified call, whereas bimodally-exposed chicks did not prefer the familiar call over the pitch-modified call. Results confirm IRH predictions, demonstrating unimodal exposure facilitates learning of modality-specific properties, whereas redundant bimodal stimulation interferes with learning of modality-specific properties

Body Phenomenology, Somaesthetics and Nietzschean Themes in Medieval Art

Richard Shusterman suggested that Maurice Merleau-Ponty neglected “‘lived somaesthetic reflection,’ that is, concrete but representational and reflective body consciousness.” While unsure about this assessment of Merleau-Ponty, lived somaesthetic reflection, or what the late Sam Mallin called “body phenomenology”—understood as a meditation on the body reflecting on both itself and the world—is my starting point. Another is John Dewey’s bodily theory of perception, augmented somewhat by Merleau-Ponty. With these starting points, I spent roughly 20 hours with St. Benedict Restores Life to a Young Monk (c. 1360), a work of tempera and gold leaf on panel, by Giovanni Del Biondo, active in Italy from 1356 to 1398, on display in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection. Following Dewey’s suggestion that “[t]he eye ... is only the channel through which a total response takes place,” meaning that motor, emotional, intellectual and non-visual perceptual capacities become active when we encounter paintings, I describe how the work engaged a range of bodily modalities; and how reflecting on these, in turn, supplied phenomenal articulations of life negating, preserving and enhancing forces important in the culture that produced it, and famously discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche. By virtue of the approach adopted, I also demonstrate Dewey’s belief that intimate engagement with art entails a total coordination of one’s capacities around the artwork, while simultaneously reinforcing Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception and how we can find phenomenal articulations of concepts such as the Nietzschean ones just mentioned. While focusing on Del Biondo’s painting, my main purpose is to engage in body phenomenology practices, and to show, in the words of Shusterman, how “[w]e might sharpen our appreciation of art through more attention to our somaesthetic feelings involved in perceiving art” and indeed the world