The psychological basis of music appreciation: Structure, self, source.

Research has investigated psychological processes in an attempt to explain how and why people appreciate music. Three programs of research have shed light on these processes. The first focuses on the appreciation of musical structure.

Artistic misunderstandings: The emotional significance of historical learning in the arts.

The Distancing-Embracing model does not have the conceptual resources to explain artistic misunderstandings and the emotional consequences of historical learning in the arts. Specifically, it suggests implausible predictions about emotional distancing caused by art schemata (e.g.

Agent tracking: a psycho-historical theory of the identification of living and social agents.

To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identification. In contrast to universalist theories, contextualist theories appeal to particular historical and sociocultural contexts for explaining agent-identification.

Explaining person identification: an inquiry into the tracking of human agents.

To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent ("a tracker") to track a human person ("a target") and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification. First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people (the face-recognition program). Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the parts and activities of the mental mechanisms that control the perceptual recognition of persons.

A psycho-historical research program for the integrative science of art.

Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain why many experimental studies do not belong to a psycho-historical science of art.

The artful mind meets art history: toward a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation.

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions.

A study in the cognition of individuals' identity: solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking.

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents.