Children Readily Think About People’s Minds When They Think About Artworks

Abstract

Art education includes activating two sources for developmental change. One resource that can be called upon to promote developmental change is external to the child, encouraged by teaching and by exposure to artworks. The other resource acts as a pacemaker internal to the child’s own cognitive development, facilitated by some conception of the minds of artists and viewers. Studies show how children become interested in the intentions which give rise to artworks and to subsequent exhibition to the viewing public. A natural grasp of intention is readily activated in experimentation by psychologists and might profitably be mobilized by educators in helping children develop their ideas about possible relations between artworks, artists, and viewers.

Art made by artificial intelligence: The effect of authorship on aesthetic judgments.

“…Additionally, as human-robot interaction research teaches us, the implementation and use of an artificial architecture, along with understanding the human response to AI behavior, also aims to shed light on the mechanisms that drive human cognition and social nature (e.g., Manzi, Di Dio, et al, 2021;Rotenberg et al, 2015;Wiese, Metta, & Wykowska, 2017;Wykowska, Chaminade, & Cheng, 2016). From developmental psychology, we learn that art fruition readily leads the perceiver to think about the authors' minds (Allen & Freeman, 2020;Savazzi et al, 2014), as also supported by brain-imaging studies suggesting that understanding the intentions behind human-made products elicits neural activity in areas dedicated to mental state attribution (Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2009). Therefore, to guide us in understanding people's attitudes toward and conceptualization of the robot mind, as well as the psychological processes that drive aesthetic evaluations more in general, we also asked participants to assess the quality of the mental contents of the putative robot and human artist.…”