A new theme issue on “Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives” has recently been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The issue was edited by Jacopo Frascaroli, Helmut Leder, Elvira Brattico and Sander Van de Cruys. It contains 17 new contributions on the emergent encounter between predictive processing and the arts and aesthetics.
In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the Predictive Processing framework. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic behaviours as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest, including perception, cognition, learning, attention, curiosity, affect, motivation, well-being, and the dynamics of sub-personal and person-level experience. This theme issue provides a timely synthesis of this ambitious research programme, laying down a framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind.
Most of the papers (including the introduction) are available open access at: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2024/379/1895.