About

'Art and Affect in the Predictive Mind' is a three-day international and interdisciplinary conference that brought together philosophers, art historians and cognitive scientists for the first systematic exploration of the interactions between predictive processing and aesthetics.

The conference was held online on 30 June - 2 July 2021.

Invited Speakers

Karl Friston (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London)

Ladislav Kesner (Masaryk University, Brno & National Institute of Mental Health, Klecany)

Claudia Muth (Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg)

Diana Omigie (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Sander Van de Cruys (University of Antwerp)

Peter Vuust (Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University & Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus)

The Theme

Predictive Processing (PP) is arguably the hottest topic in present-day cognitive science, its wide-ranging explanatory ambitions having aroused in equal measure enthusiasms and scepticisms. Originally conceived as a general theory of brain function, PP has rapidly been extended to explain "perception, action, reason, attention, emotion, experience and learning" (Clark 2015) and even, according to the advocates of its most general formulation, life and sentience as such (Friston 2013). PP accounts are currently being proposed and discussed in an impressive range of topics that spans from cellular metabolism to cultural dynamics, from neuronal electrophysiology to narrative practices and hermeneutics.

Recently, PP has attracted the attention of a number of scholars working in philosophical aesthetics and in the psychology of art. A growing body of research is linking beauty and aesthetic pleasure with the need of the predictive agent to minimise uncertainty about the causes of its sensory states. According to this view, artworks are essentially uncertainty-resolving, epistemically-rewarding streams of information that gain their satisfying character by continuously affording competing predictions about possible outcomes and then dispelling uncertainty over such predictions. What is emerging from the applications of this intuition to several art forms is a promising way to unify artworks as diverse as a painting, a symphony, a novel, a film and a cathedral under a common analytical framework, and a fresh reconceptualization of long-debated issues in aesthetics such as the nature of aesthetic pleasure, the beholder’s share and the cognitive value of art.

In the meantime, art and aesthetics are becoming increasingly interesting subjects for PP advocates. Artworks (especially paintings, musical pieces, narratives) are beginning to be seen as powerful tools to investigate the fundaments of the predictive brain, as they afford a unique perspective on how predictions are formed and deployed in the processing of richly structured sensory streams. On the other hand, traditional notions of philosophical aesthetics such as that of disinterestedness are challenging bedrock ideas of the PP framework and are animating a discussion that can lead to a better understanding of such issues as affect, valence, reward, motivation and exploratory behaviours for the predictive agent.

‘Art and Affect in the Predictive Mind’ will bring together philosophers, art historians and cognitive scientists to explore these rich and still largely uncharted interactions between PP and aesthetic experience. Each of the three day of the conference will alternate presentations giving empirically-informed PP accounts of specific art forms (visual arts, music, literature, narrative) and more theoretical contributions discussing the mutual implications of aesthetics and PP. With its focus on several art forms and its interdisciplinary character, the event is a great opportunity to build networks in what has until now been a promising but rather scattered stream of research: compelling PP accounts of music, visual art, literature, and narrative have already been developed, but they rarely inform one another, and their broader consequences are yet to be assessed. By connecting scholars working in different disciplines and on different art forms, the organisers aim not only to test the capacity of PP as a general framework for aesthetic phenomena, but also to promote new collaborations and foster further interdisciplinary research. Results, future directions and outstanding questions will be discussed in a final roundtable. What will emerge will hopefully be a coherent picture with potentially far-reaching consequences for our understanding of both aesthetic experience and the predictive mind, and a virtuous example of how art and cognitive science can bring each other into focus, to the benefit of both.


Some references

On PP and visual art:

  • Kesner, L. (2014). The predictive mind and the experience of visual art work. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1417.

  • Muth, C., & Carbon, C. C. (2013). The Aesthetic Aha: On the pleasure of having insights into Gestalt. Acta Psychologica, 144(1), 25-30.

  • Muth, C., & Carbon, C. C. (2016). SeIns: Semantic instability in art. Art & Perception, 4(1-2), 145-184.

  • Van de Cruys, S., & Wagemans, J. (2011). Putting reward in art: A tentative prediction error account of visual art. i-Perception, 2(9), 1035-1062.


On PP and music:

  • Cheung, V. K., Harrison, P. M., Meyer, L., Pearce, M. T., Haynes, J. D., & Koelsch, S. (2019). Uncertainty and surprise jointly predict musical pleasure and amygdala, hippocampus, and auditory cortex activity. Current Biology, 29(23), 4084-4092.

  • Gebauer, L., Kringelbach, M. L. & Vuust, P. (2012). Ever-changing cycles of musical pleasure. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 22, 152–167.

  • Gold, B. P., Pearce, M. T., Mas-Herrero, E., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2019). Predictability and uncertainty in the pleasure of music: a reward for learning?. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(47), 9397-9409.

  • Koelsch, S., Vuust, P., & Friston, K. (2019). Predictive processes and the peculiar case of music. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(1), 63-77.

  • Mencke, I., Omigie, D., Wald-Fuhrmann, M., & Brattico, E. (2019). Atonal music: Can uncertainty lead to pleasure?. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12, 979.

  • Omigie, D. (2015). Dopamine and epistemic curiosity in music listening. Cognitive Neuroscience, 6(4), 222-224.

  • Salimpoor, V. N., Zald, D. H., Zatorre, R. J., Dagher, A., & McIntosh, A. R. (2015). Predictions and the brain: How musical sounds become rewarding. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(2), 86-91.


On PP in other art forms and various theoretical issues:

  • Friston, K. J. (2013). The fantastic organ. Brain, 136(4), 1328-1332.

  • Lehne, M., & Koelsch, S. (2015). Toward a general psychological model of tension and suspense. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 79.

  • Omigie, D. (2015). Music and literature: Are there shared empathy and predictive mechanisms underlying their affective impact?. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1250.

  • Seth, A. K. (2019). From unconscious inference to the beholder’s share: Predictive perception and human experience. European Review, 27(3), 378-410.

  • Van de Cruys, S., Chamberlain, R., & Wagemans, J. (2017). Tuning in to art: A predictive processing account of negative emotion in art. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, 41-42.


On affect, valence and emotion in PP:

  • Hesp, C., Smith, R., Parr, T., Allen, M., Friston, K. J., & Ramstead, M. J. (2021). Deeply felt affect: The emergence of valence in deep active inference. Neural Computation, 33(1), 1-49.

  • Joffily, M., & Coricelli, G. (2013). Emotional valence and the free-energy principle. PLoS Computational Biology, 9(6).

  • Kiverstein, J., Miller, M., & Rietveld, E. (2019). The feeling of grip: Novelty, error dynamics, and the predictive brain. Synthese, 196(7), 2847-2869.

  • Van de Cruys, S. (2017). Affective value in the predictive mind. In T. K. Metzinger & W. Wiese, Philosophy and predictive processsing, MIND Group.


On curiosity, exploration and epistemic value in PP:

  • Friston, K., Rigoli, F., Ognibene, D., Mathys, C., Fitzgerald, T., & Pezzulo, G. (2015). Active inference and epistemic value. Cognitive Neuroscience, 6(4), 187-214.

  • Friston, K. J., Lin, M., Frith, C. D., Pezzulo, G., Hobson, J. A., & Ondobaka, S. (2017). Active inference, curiosity and insight. Neural Computation, 29(10), 2633-2683.

Organising Committee

Jacopo Frascaroli (Department of Philosophy, University of York)

Firat Altun (York Music Psychology Group, University of York)

Monika Axmannova (Department of History of Art, University of York)

Tracey Davison (Department of History of Art, University of York)

Genevieve Stegner-Freitag (Department of History of Art, University of York)