Description
This paper explores the developmental aesthetics of active touch in haptic imagery as become transformed into a drawing. Touch and haptic imagery embody both exteroceptive (object-centered) and interoceptive (body-centered) functions within a single sensory system, being an interface between the body and the outside world (Haggard, et al., 2004). Newman et al., (2004) found that although the geometric haptic judgments elicited greater involvement of visual imagery, imagery could function in multiple ways in judgments about material properties, particularly roughness. Klatzky et al., (1991) suggested that haptic imagery (tactile and kinesthetic) plays a functional role in the judgments about material properties. Yet, touch remains under-explored within contemporary aesthetics or theories of aesthetic development, despite Gardner's suggestions that tactile training could facilitate children's sensitivity to style. Based on this premise and on the enactive/embodied nature of haptic imagery, we explored, in a repeated measure's design, 62 children's ability (4-to-12 years-old) to transform their haptic experience of a complex shell (acute endings and perplex hollow), while blindfolded, into a drawing under two experimental conditions: a) touch to feel and draw & b) touch to draw the shape. Nine measures were employed throughout (i.e., intersections, complexity, unity, geometric & roughness etc). The results showed that for younger children (4- to 7-years-old) sensitivity to material properties in the feeling condition facilitates sensitivity to geometric properties; whereas for older children (7- to 12-years-old), sensitivity to material properties in both conditions facilitates advanced geometric properties in the shape condition, inducing however the processing of semantic object representations which underplays the embodied vividness or perspective 3D organization of the drawings that appear in the youngers’ drawings in the feeling condition. The drop of embodied-kinesthetic imagery in expressive perception and the shift to object imagery around the age of 9 is discussed regarding the two-facets of style sensitivity.
| Names, affilations and contact information | Despina Stamatopoulou, University of Patras, stamatod@upatras.gr |
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| Bio | Despina Stamatopoulou is Professor of Psychology at University of Patras, Greece. She holds degrees from Athens University (BSc 1988), University College London (M.A. 1996), and University of Bristol (Ph.D. 1994). Her research focus on: aesthetic experience and development; imagination, expressive perception, embodiment, aesthetic emotions, phenomenology of emotions and culture. She publishes in the field of Aesthetics (i.e., Empathy and the aesthetic: why does art still move us? Cognitive-Processing; 2018); Development (i.e., Symbol formation and the embodied self: A microgenetic case-study examination of the transition to symbolic communication in making-marks activities”. New Ideas in Psychology; 2011); or, other collects (i.e., Finding elusive resonance across culture time and space. In P. Vorderer & C. Klimmt (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Entertainment Theory; 2021). |