Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Toward a Science of Aesthetics: Ideas and Issues
Arthur P. Shimamura

Part I: Philosophical Perspectives

2. The Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Psychology, and Neuroscience: Studies in Literature, Visual Arts, and Music
Noël Carroll, Margaret Moore, & William P. Seeley

3. Aesthetic Theory and Aesthetic Science: Prospects for Integration
Vincent Bergeron and Dominic McIver Lopes

4. Triangulating Aesthetic Experience
Murray Smith

5. Art and the Anthropologists
Gregory Currie

6. Aesthetic Science and Artistic Knowledge
Blake Gopnik

Part II: Psychological Perspectives

7. Empirical Investigation of an Aesthetic Experience with Art
Paul J. Locher

8. Hidden Knowledge in Aesthetic Judgments: Preferences for Colors and Spatial Compositions
Stephen E. Palmer, Karen B. Schloss, and Jonathan S. Gardner

9. Processing Fluency, Aesthetic Pleasure, and Culturally Shared Taste
Rolf Reber

10. Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience
Paul J. Silvia

11. Artistic Development: The Three Essential Spheres
Kimberly M. Sheridan and Howard Gardner

Part III: Neuroscience Perspectives

12. Neuroaesthetics: Growing Pains of a New Discipline
Anjan Chatterjee

13. The Modularity of Aesthetic Processing and Perception in the Human Brain: Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Neuroaesthetics
Ulrich Kirk

14. Art Compositions Elicit Distributed Activation in the Human Brain
Alumit Ishai

15. A Cognitive and Behavioral Neurological Approach to Aesthetics
Zachary A. Miller & Bruce L. Miller

16. Neurology of Visual Aesthetics: Indian Nymphs, Modern Art, and Sexy Beaks
V. S. Ramachandran and Elizabeth Seckel

About the Author

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He investigates human memory and cognition using neuroimaging techniques and by studying individuals with memory disorders. Dr. Shimamura is a founding member of the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, has been a scientific advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium Science Museum, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to explore art, aesthetics and brain.

Stephen E. Palmer, is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus is on visual perception, a topic closely related to his color photography. He is the author of Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, an advanced, interdisciplinary textbook on visual perception. He is currently working on a new book about color: Reversing the Rainbow: Reflections on Color and Consciousness.

Reviews

"Shimamura and Palmer's excellent book resurrects Gustav Theodor Fechner's plan from the 1870s for an empirical science of art and aesthetics, a project which briefly flourished before withering during the 20th century. In a millennial renaissance, the cognitive sciences have readdressed art and aesthetics, in what Shimamura and Palmer aptly call 'Aesthetic Science'." -- Chris McManus, Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at University College London