Toronto Aesthetics Sciences and Creativity Conference: TASC 2026

Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Prof. Christoff Hadjiilieva is an expert on the cognitive neuroscience of human thought, from spontaneous thought phenomena such as mind-wandering, daydreaming, and creativity; to goal-directed thought, including deliberate reasoning and problem-solving; to clinical alterations in thought and their implications for human wellbeing. Their work also examines the neurocognitive mechanism of introspection, meta-cognition, meditation, and different forms of self-experience and self-regulation. Prof. Christoff Hadjiilieva’s research seeks to understand these mental phenomena through the dynamic interplay between large-scale brain systems, including the default, salience, and frontoparietal control networks. 

Gerald Cupchik has been a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto for more than 50 years. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan (1967), received his Masters (1970) and PhD (1972) from the University of Wisconsin, and did postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto (1972-74). He was president of the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics (1990-94), the American Psychological Association Division on Psychology and the Arts (1996-97), and the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (1998-2000). He received the Rudolf Arnheim Award in 2010 from the APA and the Gustav Fechner Award in August 2018 from the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics. He published The aesthetics of emotion: up the down staircase of the mind-body (2016, Cambridge University Press). His research interests cover aesthetics, design and imagination processes, emotional experience, pedagogy, and social communication.