Event Description
What are the factors that shape our visual engagement with images and, more broadly, the world? Are there styles of looking and attending? Some influences are well-known: what we intend to do shapes attention as do visual features in the world, what scientists call top-down and bottom-up factors. Yet what about knowledge and expectations, those things we learn and acquire as social and cultural beings? How do culture and experience mold attention and change our sensitivity to things, attunement, and our need to acquire new information? In this event, an art historian, a philosopher and a neuroscientist draw on different perspectives to examine how we visually engage with art and the world and discuss how distinct approaches can jointly explain the historical influences on visual exploration and the underlying neural mechanisms that shape how we look.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage.
Hosted by the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University.
