Vision Science and the Liberal Arts
August 5-6, 2017
Rhodes College, Memphis, TN
AALAC Debriefing
Videos of the talks may be found here. Accompanying slides are here.
Description
Vision is our most critical sense, utilizing, by some estimates, 50% of our neural processing. The widespread and intuitive appeal of visual perception has drawn interest from the liberal arts for millennia, from art history, to philosophy, to neuroscience. In the domain of art, our brains have no difficulty interpreting a 3D scene depicted on a 2D canvas. Artists bend the physics of our world to create compelling visual illusions, implicitly providing insight into the inner workings of our brains. In philosophy, phenomenologists reason about the role of vision in conscious experience, and just how much unconscious vision influences our behaviors. During this workshop, we will explore the connections between these disciplines through the common thread of visual experience. Some of the workshop themes will include: How has art revealed to scientists some of the neural architecture of vision, including depth, color, form, and shadow perception? What is the connection between phenomenology and physical reality? How does one best design an advanced or first-year seminar centered on the connections between visual perception and these other disciplines?
The purpose of this workshop is to explore the rich connections vision science has to seemingly disparate disciplines by bringing in scholars from art history, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology.
Organizer
Jason Haberman, Rhodes College
Speakers
Jeremy Wilmer, Wellesley College
Miriam Clinton, Rhodes College
Patrick Cavanagh, Dartmouth College
Rosa Lafe-Sousa, Formerly at Wellesley College
Mariko Moher, Williams College
Michael Cohen, Amherst College
Dan Levin, Vanderbilt University
Rebecca Fowler, FedEx