Abstract
Situated cognition seems incompatible with strong decoupling, where representations are deployed in the absence of their targets and are not oriented toward physical action. Yet, in art consumption, the epitome of a strongly decoupled cognitive process, the artwork is a physical part of the environment and partly controls the perception of its target by the audience, leading to immersion. Hence, art consumption combines strong decoupling with situated cognition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
The terms absence and presence have to be understood literally: An object (e.g., a representational target) is present if it is a part of the physical environment of the agent and absent otherwise.
The notion of extended cognition was introduced by Clark and Chalmers (1998):
Extended cognition occurs whenever a cognitive process is extended beyond the agent’s brain (and body) to include one or several artifacts in the actual environment that support(s) it in such a way that they not only direct or orient the cognitive process (as in situated cognition), but are part of the cognitive process.
Here, I will only be concerned with ‘traditional’ representative artworks that use the visual modality, i.e., paintings.
Experimental work on the visual perception of art has reached the same conclusion (see the papers in Hecht, Schwartz and Atherton 2003).
The notion of category mistake was introduced by Ryle (1949) to refer to cases where confusion is introduced by the erroneous application of a category to an object for which it is inappropriate. My view here is that the distinction between environments occurs at the conceptual level, while immersion is a perceptual experiential phenomenon, and that it is thus inappropriate to question immersion on the basis of a distinction that occurs out of perception, at the conceptual level.
References
Chemero A (2009) Radical embodied cognitive science. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Clark A, Chalmers D (1998) The extended mind. Analysis 58:7–19
Gibson JJ (1986) The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale
Gombrich EH (1961) Art and illusion. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Guelton B (2014) Les Figures de l’immersion. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes
Hecht H, Schwartz R, Atherton M (2003) Looking into pictures. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Lopes D (1996) Understanding pictures. Clarendon Press, Oxford
McLaughlin B, Bennett K (2014) Supervenience. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/. Accessed 20 May 2015
Ryle G (1949) The concept of mind. Hutchinson, London
Wollheim R (1980) Art and its objects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Reboul, A. Decoupling, situated cognition and immersion in art. Cogn Process 16 (Suppl 1), 355–358 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0721-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0721-x