Neurofilmology of the Moving Image

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The ‘tensive motifs’ of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of ‘Neurofilmology’—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

Neurofilmology of the Moving Image

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void … Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator's sense of equilibrium. The 'tensive motifs' of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams, and offer imaginary forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition, along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of 'Neurofilmology'—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—, this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception

What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically oriented procedures. This chapter argues that this strategy constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology of phenomenal contrast arguments, but that there is a respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable. The chapter thus has two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible contents debate into a multimodal framework. The second is to explore whether experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal account of perception’s admissible contents. The chapter concludes that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view.

The influence of the destructive internet content on the legal awareness of the youth

The paper analyzes the ways in which destructive internet content influences the legal awareness of youth. Young people use the Internet most actively, so they are the most subject to the influence of both positive and negative internet trends. Various means of legal education will be inefficient if the character and learning styles of the younger generation are not taken into consideration. The authors define the specifics of the perception of the information by Generation Z, aka zoomers. Also, they briefly survey some features of internet content, especially those that are significant for perceptual psychology. The authors draw conclusions about trends in the sphere of education, as well as offer some recommendations about how to use the knowledge of the specifics of Generation Z in the legal education process

Touch/Space: The Haptic in 21st-Century Video Art

Through the conceptual framework of the haptic, this essay charts a striking motif in much recent video art: the co-presence of a hand touching the screen and a distinctly layered spatiality. Critically deploying various notions of the haptic culled from film and media theory and perceptual psychology, Sæther discusses Trisha Baga’s low-tech 3D video Flatlands (2010) and Victoria Fu’s immersive video installation Belle Captive I (2012) and expounds a contemporary haptic space that verges between planarity and volume, between the near and far, and that exceeds the frame to enfold us. As Sæther argues, the salience of this motif points to the split between human sense perception and the networked, computational operations of 21st-century media, and the attempt to grasp this split.

Attentional Engines

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? My proposal is that artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts that have been intentionally designed to direct attention to critical stylistic features that reveal their point, purpose, or meaning. My suggestion is that there is a lot that we can learn about art from interdisciplinary research focused on our perceptual engagement with artworks. These kinds of studies can reveal how we recognize artworks, how we differentiate them from other, more quotidian artifacts. In doing so they reveal how artworks function as a unique source of value. Our interactions with artworks draw on a broad base of shared artistic and cultural constitutive of different categories of art. Cognitive systems integrate this information into our experience of art, guiding attention, and shaping what we perceive. Our understanding and appreciation of artworks is therefore carried in our perceptual experience of them. Teasing out how this works can contribute valuable information to our philosophical understanding of art. Attentional Engines explores this interdisciplinary strategy for understanding art. It articulates a cognitivist theory of art grounded in perceptual psychology and the neuroscience attention and demonstrates its application to a range of puzzles in the philosophy of the arts, including questions about the nature of depiction, the role played by metakinesis in dance appreciation, the nature of musical expression, and the power of movies.

Perceptual Psychology: a Transcendental Perspective

Using the meta-empirical foundations of the transcendental approach to the study of perception, the author organizes and generalizes the theoretical and empirical data of modern foreign and domestic perceptual studies (about 1,000 sources) in the following areas: methodological and methodical aspects of the modern perceptual psychology; correlation of types of scientific rationality in the modern perceptual psychology; the process of perception as a special function of the psyche, etc. The paper identifies the core methodological and methodical trends in the development of the modern perceptual psychology: expanded requirements for the lack of bias, accuracy and reliability of experimental studies; ontologization of the research subject; complexity and crosscutting features of the research system; the active use of modern technological opportunities, including the renovation of classical research methods. The author substantiates the methodological necessity of a brand new resource for studying perception from the proper positions of meta-empirical foundations — a transcendental approach, in which the directly sensory process of perception is positioned as a process of form generation helping to distinguish the generative quality of this process and capture its diffe­rence from the structural qualities of other information processes. Against the modern trends in the positioning of perception as an auxiliary stage of latent representation and categorization of objects of the external world, the author shows the relevance and identifies the means of distinguishing perception as a special function of the psyche. The paper substantiates the transcendental type of scientific rationality, alternative to the epistemological paradigm of cognition.