Mirror to the World: Art and Creativity

Funding Source: Templeton Religion Trust

Team Members: Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Pablo Tinio, Rebekah Rodriguez-Boerwinkle

This project is founded on the basic proposition of aesthetic cognitivism that one of the values of art is in its role to facilitate understanding of ourselves, the human condition, and moral and spiritual concepts. We aim to uncover the most profound aspects of the art experience—the thoughts, emotions, understandings, and insights gained by viewers during aesthetic encounters. To focus our inquiry, we adopt the mirror model of art from psychology and make specific predictions about how artists communicate meanings and understandings and how audiences access them. In our Phase I project, we examined two cognitive outcomes of engaging with art at the Whitney Museum in New York: the understandings gained by viewers and the enhancement of creative thinking. The Phase II project builds on this foundational work.

To contribute to the growth of aesthetic cognitivism research, this project will develop a tool to measure the understandings gained from engaging with art. The instrument will be made freely available to researchers and museums and used to achieve project outcomes. Another goal is to test the correspondences between the artists’ concepts, ideas, thought processes, and emotions and the extent to which these are subsequently experienced by the audience. According to the mirror model, these correspondences hold the key to explaining the deeply personal, transformative, spiritual, and transcendental experiences that people gain through art. Finally, the project will investigate the mechanisms by which engagement with art can promote creativity.

For more information about Phase I, visit the funder’s website.

• Tinio, P. P. L., & Ivcevic, Z. (in press). Mirror to the world: The power of art to build understanding and creativity. In C. R. Brewer (Ed.). Art seeking understanding: Conceptual, empirical, and experimental approaches. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids.

• Rodriguez-Boerwinkle, Rebekah. (2024, October). Mirror to the world: Art as a vehicle to create empathic understanding [Presentation]. Designing for Empathy Summit, Glencairn Museum, Bryn Athyn, PA.
• Tinio, P. P. L., & Ivcevic, Z. (2023, August). What makes visual art meaningful? In Z. Ivcevic & P. P. L. Tinio (Chairs), Interplay of cognition and emotion in the experience of visual art [Symposium]. American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Washington, DC.
• Ivcevic, Z. & Tinio, P. P. L. (2022, October). Art seeking understanding: From creation to appreciation. [Invited presentation and workshop]. Designing for Empathy Summit, Washington, DC.

• Sanders, W., & Ivcevic Pringle, Z. (2024, May 7). Pringle receives $1 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust for art, cognition, & creativity research. Yale School of Medicine.
• Ivcevic, Z. (2023, September 12). 5 Things That Make Art Meaningful. Psychology Today.
• Walther, D. B., Damiano, C., & Ivcevic, Z. (2023, May 16). Unlocking the Emotional Code of Abstract Art. Psychology Today.
• From art creation to art reception. (2023, March 8). Templeton Religion Trust.
• Vartanian, O., & Ivcevic, Z. (2023, March 7). Your Brain on Art. Psychology Today.
• How art affects the self. (2022, December 15). Closer to Truth.
• Ivcevic, Z., & Tinio, P. P. L. (2022, November 3). Art Builds Understanding. Psychology Today.

Connection to Research Agenda: Emotion Science, Methodological Advancements