Instinct and Expertise

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Emma Firestone
(Emma is a Ph.D. candidate in Cambridge’s Faculty of English. She is soon to defend her doctoral dissertation, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Improbable in Shakespeare’)

In my previous post I outlined an experiment that showed how readers attributed greater worth to heavier books, and that this effect increased (rather than decreased, as one might expect) when they knew something about the book. How might this help us think about literature?

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Pursuing this question, one must grant as a basic premise that the immersive experiences which verbal art and theatrical events create for their audiences have at least some continuity with normal lived experience itself, cognitively speaking. Life presents us with situations whose perceptual features, incidental or intentional, consort to influence how we think and react. The theatre, unfolding chronologically in multiple sensory dimensions, does the same. So too do novels and poems, certainly if one accepts the grounded-cognitivist proposal that cognition is modal (meaning that descriptions of sights prime visual simulations, sound-words cue aural simulations, and so on). The mechanisms and resources of our brains are adept both at getting us through life intact and through art with the feeling of engagement, expansion, enrichment. In short, experimental research on cognitive processes aims to describe human’s reception and interpretation of everyday life events, but these processes are surely engaged in the reception and interpretation of art, as well.

From the social-psychologist’s perspective, an advantage to acknowledging art as a form of lived experience is that art brings with it an abundance – sometimes a superabundance – of data reporting its effects on perceiving subjects over time. Experimental social psychology aims to produce controlled, accurate accounts of interpersonal dynamics of all kinds; theatre and literary criticism aim, at least in one tradition, to provide accurate accounts of how individuals comprehend and experience artistic phenomena, from Shakespearean characters to canonical poems. The critical history of any given artwork may not have been explicitly conceived as a phenomenological record of human brains, negotiating situations marked by predetermined perceptual inputs, yearning towards comprehension, gradually reaching judgments of a sort. But from the cognitive-psychological perspective, this is indeed what these reception histories represent.

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Nevertheless, one might point to a dearth, a terminological or conceptual gap, in our understanding of where, when, and how art (here I refer specifically to verbal art) engenders evaluations of itself in the course of its unfolding in the perceiver’s consciousness. All written matter, prose and verse, presents to the receptive brain an unquantifiable ocean of information, salient and incidental, signifying and non-signifying – and that is only what is internal to the work itself. There is also the matter of environmental and other variables (psychologists might call them ‘non-controlled’), from the formatting and typesetting of poems in some editions, to the architecture of theatres, to dramaturgical choices of all kinds, to, of course, the perceiver’s individual physical condition, history, knowledge of the work. All this will figure somehow in the thoughts and judgments the perceiver experiences as the work proceeds, and with which he sets the book aside or departs the theatre. The potential inputs seem infinite. That two perceivers might reach the same conclusions about any perceptual event, let alone one so complex as a theatrical representation of a human being imagined by a single mind many centuries ago, seems impossible.

But it isn’t. It happens all the time. One of theatrical and literary reception history’s remarkable, underscrutinized lessons is the frequency with which human beings reach consensus about phenomena so multivalent, they’ve become linguistic shorthand for elusiveness and incomprehensibility. Interpretations of Kubla Khan, Ode on a Grecian Urn, the character of Falstaff, (even) the character of Iago, are nowhere near as numerous as the people who have committed informed, earnest accounts of these events to print over the years. Observing this, I don’t wish to imply that these works are in any respect ‘less complex’ than they have been perceived over the years. Rather, I think that the observation indicates a need for scholars to attend more precisely to the perceptual inputs that compel, in such diverse perceivers, such consistent or at least comparable reactions.

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This brings us back to the study at hand, on the effects of perceivers’ knowledge of the object on the influence of heuristic cues, like conceptual metaphors, on their judgments of that object. An interesting, likewise counterintuitive implication of the study’s counterintuitive findings (i.e. that people with more knowledge of the object were more susceptible to insignificant sensory cues in generating object-judgments) is that more knowledge correlates with more consensus in judgments, not less.

So in connection with the topic of artistic appreciation, the study’s results suggest the obvious: readers and theatregoers who engage intensely with works of art will come to know more about these works than readers and theatregoers whose engagement is shallow (and than those, surely, who are coming to the work for the first time). But they also make some less-than-obvious suggestions, having to do with the nature of that knowledge: about what it is, exactly, that experienced perceivers ‘come to know’. The results suggest that the more one knows about a work of art, the more sensitive one is to elements in the work which are unassertive, unremarkable, even (evidently) totally immaterial to the object itself – but which still exert an important influence on those who would appraise the work’s substance and value.

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The study, though it awaits replication and corroboration from other labs, says something powerful about the extent and depth of sensitivity that informed appreciators exercise, even on low-alert. These participants discovered unawares an objective property of the book that they had not been prompted to notice: that nobody assessing a book for its content would see fit to notice. In acknowledging and utilizing the suggestions of a metaphor, they were in fact being sensitive and discriminating. When trained and committed readers / viewers reach conventional evaluations of complex artistic objects, or respond to sensory cues that in isolation would seem superficial, they may well be doing the same.

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