TY - JOUR
T1 - Reflective Imagination via the Artistic Experience
T2 - Evolutionary Trajectory, Developmental Path, and Possible Functions
AU - Wah, Alejandra
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Elsewhere I have argued that particular degrees of imagination and consciousness, a cognitive process that I call reflective imagination, distinguish humans from other species and make possible, and underlie, the artistic experience. I take the artistic experience to be the universal and characteristically human capacity to experience oneself or others in a story by means of music, dance, song, pantomime, drawing, pretend play, or spoken or written language. In this paper I reconstruct the developmental path of the reflective imagination via the artistic experience in five stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, and its plausible evolutionary trajectory from Australopithecines to Homo sapiens. Drawing upon both evolutionary and developmental theory, I conclude that the reflective imagination via the artistic experience has fulfilled, and still fulfills, important functions by activating memory systems, regulating emotional expression, promoting mutuality, training attentional focus, developing motor control, enabling prediction, freeing from actuality, sourcing identity, complexifying consciousness, and affording behavioral adaptation.
AB - Elsewhere I have argued that particular degrees of imagination and consciousness, a cognitive process that I call reflective imagination, distinguish humans from other species and make possible, and underlie, the artistic experience. I take the artistic experience to be the universal and characteristically human capacity to experience oneself or others in a story by means of music, dance, song, pantomime, drawing, pretend play, or spoken or written language. In this paper I reconstruct the developmental path of the reflective imagination via the artistic experience in five stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, and its plausible evolutionary trajectory from Australopithecines to Homo sapiens. Drawing upon both evolutionary and developmental theory, I conclude that the reflective imagination via the artistic experience has fulfilled, and still fulfills, important functions by activating memory systems, regulating emotional expression, promoting mutuality, training attentional focus, developing motor control, enabling prediction, freeing from actuality, sourcing identity, complexifying consciousness, and affording behavioral adaptation.
UR - https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.26613/esic.3.2.143?seq=1
U2 - 10.26613/esic.3.2.143
DO - 10.26613/esic.3.2.143
M3 - Article
VL - 3
SP - 53
EP - 72
JO - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
JF - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
SN - 2472-9876
IS - 2
ER -