Research and other interests: cognitive science, philosophy of art, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, philosophy of artificial intelligence and robotics, sculpture, dance, installation art. 

 

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My research in philosophy and cognitive science explores the way memory, attention, and sensorimotor processing tune the content of perception to our everyday needs and interests. I have borrowed a methodological strategy from neuroscience of art in these pursuits. Professional dancers, novice viewers, and dance stimuli have been used to study expertise effects in perception. Similar strategies have also been used to study the crossmodal perceptual processes that underwrite our capacity to recognize and understand emotionally expressive behaviors social contexts, e.g. music, film, and dance. These research strategies have also been fruitfully deployed by neuroscientists and psychologists who employ elements of film studies to explore the influences memory, attention, and environment on the structure of perceptual experience. I have argued that these methodologies generalize to a broad range of artistic media and can be used to address a range philosophical questions about perception and the nature of emotions, the ontology of art, and artistic appreciation.

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My book Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of Art (Oxford University Press, 2022) explores research at the intersection of art and cognitive science. I am working on a companion to Attentional Engines exploring the role of affective attention and aesthetics in art called Seeking Salience: affect, attention, and aesthetics in the arts. I'm also currently wrapping up the manuscript for a book about Lego robots and philosophy of artificial intelligence. Some collaborators of mine, Dr. Catherine Buell (Mathematics, Fitchburg State University) and Rick Sethi (Computer Science, Fitchburg State University), and I received an NEH grant in 2016 to develop image analysis software that could be used to study the nature of artistic style and the image statistics that drive our interactions with artworks.

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I am also a sculptor. My welded steel constructions have been exhibited in New York City, Tokyo, The Addison Gallery of American Art, Centenary College of Louisiana, Indiana University, and Yale University. I have been exploring automatic and chance procedures in drawing and dance with my philosophy of art students  for the past decade or two. I have also collaborated with colleagues in dance, music, and computer science to develop an automatic scoring technique for multi-media performances

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In my spare time I am an avid wilderness canoeist. The picture above is from a trip in 1993. I had hitched a ride 75 kilometers down Lac Mistassini with Tommy Voyageur to the Cree village of Baie du Poste. I wanted to check on the location of a forest fire blocking our way up the Wabissinane River. We were five weeks from James Bay and looking for a route around the conflagration.

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There are some stories about guitars, New York City, me, and some other folks in an unspecified past and another century. Some of them are true. But none of the muddy porch players have been booked for a garage band hoedown in a while. CBGB's, Brownies, and The Lakeside Lounge are all, like Danceteria, the Peppermint Lounge, and the Mudd Club before them, currently closed 7 days a week. Only Arlene Grocery survives. I do, however, have aspirations to remember my mandolin, pick up a lap steel, and learn how zydeco goes on an accordion.​