The predictive mind and the experience of visual art work

Ladislav Kesner

Among the main challenges of the predictive brain/mind concept is how to link prediction at the neural level to prediction at the cognitive-psychological level and finding conceptually robust and empirically verifiable ways to harness this theoretical framework toward explaining higher-order mental and cognitive phenomena, including the subjective experience of aesthetic and symbolic forms. Building on the tentative prediction error account of visual art, this article extends the application of the predictive coding framework to the visual arts. It does so by linking this theoretical discussion to a subjective, phenomenological account of how a work of art is experienced. In order to engage more deeply with a work of art, viewers must be able to tune or adapt their prediction mechanism to recognize art as a specific class of objects whose ontological nature defies predictability, and they must be able to sustain a productive flow of predictions from low-level sensory, recognitional to abstract semantic, conceptual, and affective inferences. The affective component of the process of predictive error optimization that occurs when a viewer enters into dialog with a painting is constituted both by activating the affective affordances within the image and by the affective consequences of prediction error minimization itself. The predictive coding framework also has implications for the problem of the culturality of vision. A person's mindset, which determines what top-down expectations and predictions are generated, is co-constituted by culture-relative skills and knowledge, which form hyperpriors that operate in the perception of art.