MSc Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics & Creativity

This module aims to provide students with an introduction into empirical aesthetics, focusing primarily psychological and neuroscience perspectives.

Lecture structure:

Aesthetic theory

1. History of the neuroscientific, psychological and philosophical study of aesthetics and art appreciation (Rebecca Chamberlain)
2. Psychological theories of aesthetic experience (mere exposure, gestalt psychology, information theory, processing fluency, prototypes, neuroaesthetics and evolutionary psychology) and brain mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation: reward, interest and curiosity (Guido Orgs).

Measuring aesthetic experience

1. Behavioural and neuroimaging methods used in an experimental psychology approach to aesthetics (Guido Orgs ).
2. Measuring aesthetic responses in the gallery (Guido Orgs )

The role of the stimulus in aesthetic perception

1. Stimulus-specific aspects of aesthetic perception in vision, audition, touch, taste/smell and multisensory aesthetics (Guido Orgs).
2. Aesthetic perception of bodies, faces and human movement(Guido Orgs).

The role of the observer in aesthetic perception

1. The role of expertise, culture and individual differences in aesthetic perception (Rebecca Chamberlain)
2. The role of intention, effort and authenticity in aesthetic appreciation (Rebecca Chamberlain).

The impact of aesthetics in society

1. The psychological value of engagement in the arts (Rebecca Chamberlain)
2. Applications of experimental aesthetics in consumer psychology, branding, marketing design (Rebecca Chamberlain)

This module aims to provide students with a comprehensive and an in-depth understanding about the research on creativity. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, this module will cover latest research findings from various disciplines within psychology, covering research fields such as cognitive psychology, social psychology, comparative and developmental psychology, creative arts and media, and neuroscience. It will bring the students up to date about what has been done in creativity research and how one can hone creative skills/processes.

Lecture structure:

1. Introducing Creativity (JB)
2. Measurement of creativity (JB)
3. Neuroscience of Creative Insight (JB)
4. Neuroscience of Idea Generation and Evaluation (JB)
5. Creativity and Individual Differences (JB)
6. Enhancing Creativity (JB)
7. The evolutionary origin of creativity and the arts (RCham)
8. Creativity and the development of expertise in the visual arts (RCham)
9. The creative process and creativity across the lifespan (RCham)
10. Creativity and psychopathology (RCham)

This module covers the primary statistical analyses used in psychology including:

• multivariate data
• screening and cleaning
• power and sample size determination
• factor analysis
• multiple regression
• analysing contrasts
• univariate and multivariate repeated measures
• ANCOVA and MANCOVA.

This module provides you with the core skills needed to become a successful researcher. This is achieved via two complementary strands; the first strand covers fundamental research skills: seminars on bibliographic searching, essay writing, research report writing, oral presentation skills and career planning and lab sessions in which students conduct, analyse and write up an experiment from the field of music psychology. The second strand exposes students to cutting edge research in the field of music cognition and neuroscience via the Eminent Speaker Series and involves the opportunity to produce a collaborative report from the series for the Music, Mind and brain blog.

To provide understanding and critical skills related to research design and analysis for quantitative and qualitative studies.

Lecture topics will include: psychology as science and the hypothetico-deductive account, basic concepts (e.g., validity, reliability, sampling, and measurement), experimental designs, quasi-experimental and specialised designs, survey design and analysis, single-case designs, introduction to key concepts of qualitative research, thematic approaches and methods of qualitative research (including , thematic analysis, grounded theory and IPA), and discursive approaches to qualitative research (incl. narrative analysis and discourse analysis).

A student-led seminar series, consisting of 10, two-hour seminars on design and statistics as principled argument will run alongside the lectures.

This module covers brain anatomy and functions and modern experimental techniques to study the neural basis of behaviour.

Tutors: Professor Joydeep Bhattacharya and Dr Gianna Cocchini

The objective of this module is to provide students with the opportunity to carry out an empirical research project, investigating an aspect of aesthetic or creative science from a cognitive and/or neuroscientific perspective. Typically, and in line with the primary objectives of the course, the research project will employ quantitative methods, but depending on the specific research questions, qualitative projects are also possible. The module encourages interdisciplinary topics involving staff or students in collaborating departments (Media and Communications/Computing/IMS) or with external partners (e.g. adamandeveddb, National Gallery, Siobhan Davies Dance, Laban Trinity college of Music and Dance).

Magicians have developed powerful methods of manipulating our conscious experience. This module will examine a range of these techniques and relate them to psychological phenomena, such as misdirection attention and awareness, illusions, hypnosis, magical thinking, memory illusions and other confabulations.

This module builds on the introductory level of statistics and probability theory and aims to provide students with theory and practice in the application of advanced quantitative methods across multiple areas of psychology and neuroscience.

Topics include: using R and Matlab in psychological research, logistic regression, resampling and Monte Carlo methods, psychological model fitting, Bayesian inference, structural equation modelling, time series analyses, open science tools.

Within the humanities, sciences, and outside the academy we are witnessing a ‘turn to the body’. That is, from contagions, which spread virally on social media seen to work through embodied forms of sense-making and perception, through to the amplification of the senses, attention and perception within simulated realities; the modulation of emotion, affect and feeling, and the creation of mediated intimacy across a range of media forms; through to a range of practices which target the body as the site of change, expression and transformation. The body and its capacity for mediation is central to understanding media and communications. This option will explore these debates by encouraging the student to think through their own embodied experience in relation to a number of case studies. These will include media representations and eating disorders; body image; queer and transgendered bodies; social media contagions, non-verbal and subliminal communication; affect and emotion; film and the senses (including suggestion); narrative and identity; images and the non-visual; biomediation; and mental health and the media (particularly exploring mental health and difference in the context of diasporic media).

The module draws from a wide range of debates and theories across the field of body studies, including affect studies, queer theory, feminisms, cultural studies, media studies and sociology. It will provide students with some timely and novel ways of thinking about the place of experience within contemporary governance and communication processes.

Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.

This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.

Physical Computing is of increasing interest to artists, musicians, choreographers and other creative practitioners for the creation of novel artworks and also for forms of computational interaction between these objects and people. There are many other applications of Physical Computing, for example in museums, ubiquitous and embedded computing, robotics, engineering control systems and Human Computer Interaction.

A physical environment may be sonic, tangible, tactile, visually dynamic, olfactory or any combination of these. In this module, you will learn how the environment, which is essentially continuous, can be monitored by analogue electrical and mechanical sensors. Computers, however, are digital machines programmed by software. One element which you will focus on, therefore, is the interface between the digital and the analogue.

This study will encompass basic physics, electronics, programming and software engineering. The practical objective of this module is the development of the skills you will need for designing and building interactive physical devices.

Physical Computing is an interdisciplinary area of computational art and design that blends conceptual thinking, programming, human factors, engineering, physics, a do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality, and physical crafting. This module introduces some of the intermediate prototyping, electronics and programming skills necessary for practitioners making interactive, computational physical artefacts and systems. It also introduces some more advances knowledge of physical prototyping and design, such as human factors, user experiences and user testing, and 3D modelling which are necessary to guide students in a co-evolutionary process of emergent computational art and design. Students on this module will apply these skills in their explorations of the physical making process and produce a series of interactive and physically animated experiences.

Students will work on developing a self-initiated project that explores advanced topics in the art of physical computing. These topics could include communication between embedded systems and other software, CNC fabrication such as 3D printing and laser cutting, and advanced strategies for sensing and “learning” which are useful across many types of electronic and mechanical systems.

The course will introduce you to a range of techniques and practices for creating interactive audiovisual software using generative techniques. This will include computational and process-based thinking, perspectives on audio and visual perception, algorithms for creating graphics and sound, advanced topics in computational media and project development. Every week a theme from art is introduced and then replicated and examined using code.

Objectives

• Provide the student with a fundamental understanding of code and modern computer literacy.
• Introduce and apply programming concepts and techniques using openFrameworks/C++.
• Approach programming from an artistic perspective.
• Allow for the emergence of open dialogue regarding the content being instructed.
• Invoke the student's interests to apply what they have learned outside of class.

On successful completion you will be able to:

•  Program interactive installations
•  Develop algorithms for generating images and sound
•  Reason about the aesthetics of computer art pieces 

Sample Syllabus:

• Introduction to art, tech, free software
• Introduction to openFrameworks
• Animation and intro to generative art
• Repeat, repeat, repeat: loops and arrays
• Number generators
• Images & video
• Algorithmic thiking
• Sound with maximilian
• Revision and guest artist
•  ----- project work -----

This module provides the knowledge requirement for marketing and advertising. The module will provide a critical understanding of what consumers buy, how they buy (i.e., buying patterns), and why they buy the way they do (i.e., why we see these patterns). This knowledge in turn will enable you to improve marketing and advertising strategies of organisations both on large scale and small-scale projects. By using theory, case material and practical examples, you are introduced to the importance of theory and research-based practice in these fields.

Throughout the module you will develop a contemporary, cognitive toolkit for researching, analysing, and understanding buyer behaviour. You will contrast this current approach with traditional models of marketing and advertisement. Finally, you will learn to apply this knowledge for organisational strategy initiatives (e.g., launching a new marketing campaign). This module brings together a wide range of approaches to buyer behaviour, marketing and advertising, both on organisational and project-by-project levels. You will also be offered an opportunity to apply your learning to analysing case studies.

This lecture course will introduce you to the fundamentals of consumer psychology and behavioural economics.

It will give you an understanding of the fundamental decision making processes and the factors that influence these processes. It covers topics such as prospect theory and classical economics, brain structures and information processing, heuristics and rules of thumb, and framing and influencing techniques.

It also discloses the various strategies used by marketers to differentiate their products, leverage brands, set strategic prices, reduce the effectiveness of consumer search, and it compares the effectiveness of each.

The course covers topics such as the types and effectiveness of pricing strategies, individual differences in uptake of pricing strategies, value perceptions and subconscious influences (priming), and ethical and legal issues around influencing consumer choice.

The lectures in this course will be supplemented by several assignments designed to develop and enhance practical skills, and further develop familiarity with consumer psychological methods and theories.