Interpreting Visual Art: A Survey of Cognitive Research about Pictures

Join us for this special Sunday Forum on March 13 at 12:45pm at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax, 2709 Hunter Mill Road in Oakton, VA. This event will be held in the Sanctuary Building, the large main church building to the right as you leave the parking lot.

Professor Weir’s talk, Interpreting Visual Art: A Survey of Cognitive Research about Pictures, will reveal insights from recent, systematic studies of perception, cognition, and emotion about our aesthetic experiences. Some studies introduced will be about perceiving images, particularly how we infer 3-D from a 2-D artwork. Other studies will concern how general knowledge and personal thoughts influence our understanding of a picture. When research is taken into account, interpreting art can be partially understood -- as though we are looking through a tinted glass. Many examples will be offered from the enormous portfolio of religious art available to us.

Speaker background: Catherine Weir likes to share her fascination with academic studies of cognition and perception. She spent her career as a psychology professor at University College London (22 years) and Colorado College (17 years) after finishing her PhD studies in London. Despite retiring, Catherine continues to write papers about research on perception and learning in infants and has written a book called Interpreting Visual Art: Survey of Cognitive Research about Pictures with a George Mason professor as co-author. The book, to be published by Transaction Publishers later this year, explores how findings from cognitive studies can be applied to ways we view art.

Join the Science, Reason & Religion group at UUCF to hear outstanding guest speakers address provocative topics.

For directions: https://uucf.org/directions/   For additional information, contact anekimken@cox.net

This is a free event and is open to the public. You are welcome here!