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Kate Stephens, 'The Body Knows: Contemporary Dance as a Lens on Human Perception'
Tuesday 17th June 2014, 13.30 - 15.00. Jarman 1.
Some hallmarks of contemporary dance – multimodal, largely non-verbal yet expressive, temporal and ephemeral – make dance a challenging and illuminating lens on human perception, cognition, learning, and memory. In this talk, I outline a series of projects that have used methods from cognitive psychology to investigate perception and cognition in dance. For example, the process of collaborative improvisation and dance-making by dancers and choreographer were studied and described using the Geneplore model of creative thinking. Our methods for capturing audience reactions to contemporary dance will be sketched – a pen and paper “Audience Response Tool” (ART) and a hand-held, online device for continuous recording of 1- or 2-dimensional ratings, the “portable Audience Response Facility” (pARF). More experimental methods of investigation developed and applied to dance cognition include a study of artificial grammar learning by novice dance observers, and analysis of eye movements as an implicit indicator of visual attention by expert and novice dance observers watching a dance film. These examples will be described, and implications for psychological theory, methods, and applications, discussed.
Biography
Cognitive psychologist Catherine (Kate) Stevens investigates the psychological processes in creating, perceiving, and performing music and dance, and applies experimental methods to evaluate complex systems and human-computer interaction. She holds BA (Hons) and PhD degrees from the University of Sydney. Kate is Professor in Psychology and leads the Music Cognition and Action research program in the MARCS Institute at the University of Western Sydney. (http://marcs.uws.edu.au/)