VISUAL COGNITION, 2005, 12 (3), 541±547

Book reviews
Solso, R. L. (2003). The psychology of art and the evolution of the conscious
brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 264. ISBN 0-262-192484-8. Price:
$45.00/£29.95 (hbk).

This book, with its intriguing title, explores the general notion that the appre-
ciation of visual art can be understood using basic principles of human psy-
chology and its more modern derivative, cognitive neuroscience. It specifically
attempts to link the evolution of conscious thought with the evolution of art and
to link the psychological components of consciousness such as attention,
awareness, memory, and emotion, with art appreciation. The basic thesis is that
when humans evolved conscious awareness, they were able to make conscious
associations between pleasurable experiences and stimuli. This awareness
formed the basis for a sense of aesthetics that empowered people to create and,
then, to value art. Inherent in the thesis presented here is the notion of a common
universal sense of aesthetics. Solso sees this existing as a result of a common set
of brain mechanisms that have been shaped by evolution.
The main limitation of Solso's perspective is that the appreciation of art is as
much about the diversity of preference as it is about a universal aesthetic. The
belief that all humans respond to and evaluate images in the same way has to be
pitted against the obvious fact that people differ in what they value as art and
why they value art. Because of the massive complexity of the human brain,
cognitive neuroscience has been preoccupied with describing and understanding
those aspects of human thought and behaviour and their neurobiological
underpinnings that are common to us all. Indeed, it is a widespread assumption
amongst cognitive neuroscientists that only when the basic, universal mechan-
isms are described and understood can we make progress on comprehending the
nature of our cognitive diversity. With this backdrop, Solso has placed his foot
squarely in the universal aesthetic camp and given only lip service to the role of
human diversity in art appreciation.
For me, Solso's attempts to use modern cognitive neuroscience to account for
art appreciation fails to deliver anything strikingly new. This is perhaps because
the cognitive neuroscience concepts are familiar to me and the insights he
provides on why we appreciate art seem straightforward extrapolations of
established, although in places out-of-date, ideas. However, to a person naõÈve to
cognitive neuroscience and its general perspective these ideas may seem quite
novel and exciting.

# 2005 Psychology Press Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/13506285.html DOI:10.1080/13506280444000454
542 BOOK REVIEWS

The book, written in a colloquial style, shifts between the elementary and the
somewhat more complex. Someone completely naõÈve to psychology and cog-
nitive neuroscience might not find it understandable in places; for the student of
psychology, the book seems directed at an undergraduate level. On the other
hand, the treatment of art seems very elementary and uses a conventional set of
artworks (almost exclusively paintings) to illustrate points. For a book about
visual art, the pictures and diagrams are decidedly unexciting. There are few
colour plates and the diagrams could be part of any conventional elementary text
in Psychology.
The book begins with a tutorial on looking at art. Here, Solso proposes that
seeing art occurs as two levels. The first is a ``nativitistic'', sensory level
wherein the ``bottom-up'' mechanics of vision are marshalled to the task of
visual analysis. This stage, he proposes, is ``independent of conscious control''
and we are ``enslaved by photons and physiology''. The assumption is that we
are all the same and we all ``see'' a work of art identically at this stage. Then he
proposes a second ``directed'', top-down stage of perception based on learning
and experience, one that makes use of selective attention and consciousness. He
proposed that this stage produces a perception of art that is highly personal and
individual because it is at this stage that semantics, emotion, and personal
relevance come into play. However, this general division of the mental processes
produced in response to seeing art into a nonconscious bottom-up stage and a
consciously controlled, top-down stage is based on a dated, feedforward view of
perceptual processing. Here, and at several other points in the book, there is an
uneasy, uncertain sense of where in this two-stage scheme consciousness
actually comes into play and where individual differences in art appreciation
might emerge. At the end of this tutorial, he states that there is no place within
his two-stage model to explain ``the profound and enigmatic effect art has on
people''. This is a real disappointment because this should be what a thesis on
art and perception is about. One wonders if the general ideas presented here
could be used equally well to explain our interpretation of an everyday adver-
tisement or an ordinary (not particularly artistic) scene. Psychology already has
good theories and ideas about how humans interpret complex scenes and this
book provides no advance on these.
In the first chapter, entitled ``Art and the rise of consciousness'' Solso out-
lines his ``model'' of awareness, pointing to ``the five facets of consciousness''.
These are attention, arousal, memory, emotion, and the notion that brain
structures mediate consciousness (something he calls architecture). The role of
each is described in an elementary fashion. Unfortunately, a model of con-
sciousness is not really presented. Moreover, the theoretical notions that form
the basis for each ``facet'' seem outdated and, to the experimental psychologist,
overly simple to be of significant interest.
Chapter 2 explores human evolution. This is an interesting chapter for those
uninformed about this but some of the inferences made involve far-fetched,
 BOOK REVIEWS 543

unsubstantiated extrapolations from studies of anthropological evolution to

neural mechanisms. There are numerous contradictions. How can a chapter on
human evolution also contain the following statement: ``In the African crucible
of human creation, God reached down into the mud and from it created a man
and a woman'' (p. 64)? The discussion of the brain's evolution is used to
introduce some concepts about brain organization (e.g., visual modules, memory
systems), but, as in the preceding chapter, the concepts are too simple to be of
interest to experimental psychologists and my guess is that they are too hap-
hazard to be of much use as an introduction to brain mechanism for the layman.
The third chapter, ``Art and vision'' suffers along the same lines. Here, Solso
provides a piecemeal, introductory-level meander through the basics of visual
science. There are multiple irrelevant digressions and the application of visual
science to art is conventional. However, there are some interesting nuggets of
information (especially about colour) and, for those naõÈve about visual proces-
sing, this chapter is probably of value. It assumes that low-level visual pro-
cessing is immune from the influences of high-level semantic and emotional
interpretation and that visual processing is fully feedforward. As such it seems
outdated and uninformed by the exciting current notions that rapid parallel
processing involving brain areas that contribute to emotional, motor, semantic,
and executive control functions can modulate even very early visual processing.
Next there is a chapter developing the notion that consciousness emerged from
evolutionary pressures. This chapter, ``Art and the brain'', explores brain
organization. However, as in the preceding chapters, the text wanders. We are
given a cursory introduction to neurons, neuroscience imaging, parallel dis-
tributed processing, reaction time paradigms, semantic priming, localization of
function, and a discussion of the division of the extrastriate visual pathway into
ventral and dorsal routes. Here, taking visual modularity to an extreme, Solso
suggests that artworks could eventually be classified by the brain area each
activates, rather than the ``subjective'' categorization of art scholars. He goes so
far as to extrapolate from a recent brain imaging study to say that ``the processing
of realistic objects takes place in different regions of the brain than the processing
of `abstract' objects. It is plausible to extend this argument to surrealistic forms of
art which, I would hypothesize, perform out of another cerebral theatre'' (p. 129).
Such a view denies the well-established interactivity of brain structures and seems
naõÈve for a book offering a cognitive neuroscience theory of art. Contradicting his
own point of view, he then acknowledges that individual, high-level interpretation
of art involves a ``tangle of meandering streams aroused by complex thoughts''
(p. 131). Solso is pessimistic that neuroscience can ever address our complex
responses to art. Perhaps this is because he sees neuroscience as a brain-mapping
exercise rather than the investigation of process and mechanism. Once again we
are left with a set of ideas of how all humans might process any (ordinary?) image
and no real insight into how individuals interpret images, especially art images, in
meaningful and emotive ways.
544 BOOK REVIEWS

One of the most interesting and more up-to-date chapters in this book is the
one on faces. Solso reviews the evolution of faces in mammals and then dis-
cusses their importance in art. He reviews some of the relevant neuroscience and
behavioural studies of face processing, espousing the ``faces are special'' view.
This chapter is again somewhat piecemeal, going into considerable depth on
specific studies of face distortion adaptation yet neglecting a whole literature on
the seemingly relevant area of face expression interpretation. He finishes this
section with the proposal that we evolved neural networks, so called ``aesthetic
cells'', responsive to attractive things, faces among them. He proposes that these
cells are ``innate (though with cultural `tuning'), are pragmatic (for survival
purposes), are universal, are sexual, and play a vital role in social interactions . . .
[and] as a by-product gave humankind art'' (p. 167). For me this is where
Solso's thesis becomes cloudy. If the so-called aesthetic cells are ``universal'',
then why are people so different in their preference for art? At several points in
the book he suggests that individuality in response to art stems from late, high-
level, semantic interpretation, but he never connects this later stage with the so-
called ``aesthetic cells'' presumably necessary for art appreciation.
There are two chapters dealing with illusions, a seemingly obligatory com-
ponent of a book on psychology and art. After discussing perceptual veridicality,
the standard visual illusions are described with examples from works of art.
Perceptual constancies, illusions of depth, motion, and size are discussed. The
monocular and binocular cues to depth are reviewed as in any introductory
psychology text, with the addition of examples from drawing and photography.
In this section there is again an emphasis on the notion of a universal aesthetic,
one that is derived from visual mechanisms. He invents a concept called species-
specific empathic perspicuity, which ``is the tendency of one member to tune
into the thoughts of another by reason of having similar perceptual-cognitive
experience . . . Your percepts are universal; your reactions to art are the same as
your neighbours; your thoughts are the same as mine'' (p. 173). But, he says,
derivation of meaning differs among people. So assuming meaning is related to
thought we have an obvious contradiction. This contradiction is at the heart of
what limits this book. The conflict between the universal and the individual
response to art is confusingly presented and never resolved. Where and how
consciousness comes into this conflict is also unclear.
The last chapter concerns higher level cognition and its role in perception and
art appreciation. At last there is a discussion of how semantic, contextual, and
personal factors influence appreciation of art. Solso explores the cognitive
concepts of schemata, prototypes, abstraction, canonical representation, and
social cognition and their relationship with art. Unfortunately, this section is
standard psychology simply applied to art. It could just as easily be applied to
ordinary, everyday scenes. In the closing pages of the book, Solso describes
what he sees as a level of art appreciation beyond semantic interpretation,
something akin to emotion, perhaps, although this is not clearly articulated. ``It
 BOOK REVIEWS 545

is being at `one' with the art; it is commingling a painting with universal

properties of the mind; it is seeing one's primal mind in a painting'' (p. 258). In
stating this, Solso is once again asserting that art appreciation is based on
universal principles that derive from a common brain structure.
Although no one would doubt that all (healthy) human brains have much in
common structurally and neurophysiologically, the obvious extension of Solso's
idea is that we all respond to art in the same way. We do not. What Solso has
missed is that along with the set of low-level, hard-wired visual mechanisms he
refers to, the human brain evolved high-level, adaptive cognitive mechanisms to
enable appropriate emotional, evaluative, cognitive, and motor responses to a
wide range of stimuli. The way these mechanisms work may well be universal,
but the information they work with is not. Consequently the mental events, both
conscious and unconscious, that they generate in each of us will vary.
For me a satisfying theory of art must deal with human diversity rather than
focus on describing a universal response to art. It is much more likely that we are
motivated to look at and create art because we want to know the individual who
is the artist, whether a stranger or ourselves. We do not seek to strengthen our
sense of the prototypical human, to recognize what is common among us, but
rather to acquaint ourselves with diversity and thus enlarge our vision of
humanity. In this way, I see Solso's emphasis on a universal aesthetic as narrow
but, at the same time, fully reflective of the science on which he has developed
his views. Clearly, a theory of art based on cognitive neuroscience that can
balance a universal preference with human diversity of taste is a tall order.
Perhaps it is premature to expect one, given our limited understanding of what
makes us each different. Solso's work will no doubt stimulate thought and
discussion of this interesting potential marriage of art and science in ways that
will benefit both disciplines.

JANE E. RAYMOND
Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology,
University of Wales, Bangor, UK

Robertson, L. C. (2003). Space, objects, minds, and brains. Hove, UK:

Psychology Press. Pp. 272. ISBN: 1-84169-0422. Price: £34.99 (hbk).

This book addresses important questions about the relationship between spatial
representation, spatial awareness, and perception of objects in the external
world. The book has a strong neuropsychological emphasis, and illustrates how
creative testing of one unique patient (RM) can address key issues in the study of
space and object perception. Several of the author's ideas are argued throughout
the book. One claim is that attentional mechanisms respond to space-based
546 BOOK REVIEWS

frames of references that organize objects into hierarchical structures. The

second claim emphasizes the crucial role of the dorsal stream in processing
explicit spatial knowledge, required for locating objects in the external world.
In the first chapter the author draws upon her own experience in neuro-
psychological assessment of patients with Balint syndrome, unilateral neglect,
and integrative agnosia to describe how perception of the external world can be
affected when perception of space is disrupted. The chapter also introduces one
of the central ideas in this book that object-based neglect observed in unilateral
neglect is space-based, where the part of space that is neglected depends on the
spatial reference frame that is selected to guide allocation of attention. Chapter 2
provides an overview of the literature on the properties of spatial reference
frames. The chapter starts with a discussion of the critical components for
establishing object-centred spatial frames of reference (e.g., origin, sense of
direction, orientation, and unit size) and continues with a discussion of how
these properties are affected in several neuropsychological phenomena des-
cribed in Chapter 1.
The third chapter addresses the notion that different spatial frames of refer-
ence can guide attention in selection of locations or regions of space. The
argument is partly built upon evidence from studies where the viewer frame and
scene-based frame (defined by the coordinate system of the stimulus display) are
dissociated through rotation, or where fixation and attention are dissociated by
spatial cueing. The chapter also includes a section on selection of local and
global frames of references (spatial resolution) and discusses the notion that an
``attentional print'', defined as the spatial scale most recently attended to,
primes selection of the spatial reference frame in a subsequent trial.
The third chapter provides the author's account for several object-based
attentional effects. The first section of this chapter specifies differences between
object- and location-based attentional effects in rotating displays (IOR), and in
static displays where within- and between-object (exogenous) cueing effects can
be compared. The author strongly advocates here that IOR in rotating displays
(both to the object and the cued location) reflects spatial updating of locations
within the display-based spatial reference frame. This is inferred from the
finding that IOR is only observed when spatial relations between objects remain
the same during rotation. Although this finding is supportive of her claim,
differential attentional effects to the cued location and the targeted object in
rotating displays remain underspecified in this account. It is further argued that
costs (IOR) are associated with the inhibition of locations only and are not
sensitive to object structure, unlike facilitation effects (e.g., boundaries). This
interpretation can account for the pattern of results found by Robertson and
Beuche when comparing within- and between-object exogenous cueing effects.
The absence of spreading inhibition across object surfaces is not, however,
consistently supported in the literature. The remainder of the chapter provides a
reinterpretation of object-based neglect in terms of the multiple frame account,
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introduced in Chapter 1. Although the author admits that a few findings remain
problematic for the multiple frame account, the discussion is interesting and
thought provoking.
Chapter 5 discusses the role of the ventral and dorsal processing stream in
processing of space. The author proposes that the dorsal stream is involved in
explicit spatial knowledge, but not in implicit spatial encoding. Below aware-
ness, spatial information may be processed in several different structures,
such as the ventral medial premotor cortex/putamen (eye±hand coordination),
superior colliculus/frontal eye field (eye-movement control), hippocampal
place cells (spatial memory), precentral sulcus, and in the ventral stream. Evi-
dence is partly provided in a detailed description of spared and impaired spa-
tial encoding of a patient with Balint syndrome (RM). Despite chance
performance on tasks measuring explicit spatial knowledge, RM showed evi-
dence of encoding of global form, spatial relationships between two objects,
and some evidence of encoding of more complex spatial relations when tested
implicitly. The author's ideas about the role of the ventral stream are dis-
cussed against a model proposing that the ventral stream represents spatial
structures of objects that are sufficient to support awareness. Both supporting
and contradicting evidence from two Balint patients is discussed for explicit
access to spatial relations within objects (parts of objects), including the pos-
sible influence of top-down processes on the patients' ability to locate parts
of objects.
In Chapter 6 the author argues that explicit spatial knowledge is required for
binding surface features, such as shape, colour, and motion. Interesting evidence
is reported from a series of studies investigating visual search performance of
RM, which was characterized by a high percentage of illusory conjunctions. It is
further proposed that feature binding and individuation of objects relies on the
integrity of the parietal lobes, although the debate about the specific functions of
the parietal cortex in feature binding is left unresolved.
Chapter 7 describes an integrative analysis of the relationship between spatial
awareness and perception, as revealed by spatial deficits associated with brain
injury (bilateral and unilateral parietal lesions, and lesions to the ventral right
hemisphere). Chapter 8 includes a summary of all chapters and several unre-
solved issues/questions are identified for future research.
In general this book provides an interesting view on the relationship between
awareness and spatial processing. As mentioned in one of the reviews on the
cover, the book ``reads like a novel''. It is therefore not only important for
researchers in the field of space and object perception, but also accessible to
undergraduates who have a particular interest in cognitive neuroscience.

PETRA M. J. POLLUX
University of Lincoln, UK