Abstracts from the 5th Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC)

This special issue of Art & Perception for the first time comprises the abstracts of talks and posters presented at a Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC). This year’s, 5th installment of VSAC took place in Berlin, August 25th-27th, with 117 contributions selected for presentation and more than 250 participants. This issue includes an editorial by Claus-Christian Carbon and Joerg Fingerhut that introduces the contributions and discussions at the conference. The abstracts of the keynotes presented by Jesse Prinz and Irving Biederman are then followed by those of the peer reviewed presentations: talks/symposia (in order of presentation) and posters (in alphabetical order). The talks are clustered around central topics in the sciences of the arts, such as aesthetic universals vs. cross-cultural differences, some works are focusing on physiological measures in the aesthetic sciences, or on visual statistics of art images, others address the important issue of ecological valid testing of aesthetic experiences. The contributions to this year’s VSAC demonstrated a clear broadening of topics at the intersection of the visual sciences and the arts. Many presentations went beyond the focus on immediate sensory responses to artworks and simple evaluative states in order to also discuss the typical richness and elaborative quality of art experience that psychologists, philosophers, art historians, sociologists, and others recognize as an intellectually engaged, historically situated, and culturally varied phenomenon. The reprint of these abstracts therefore also aims to represent a cross-section of current research and debates in the field.