This paper has a rather audacious purpose: to present a comprehensive theory explaining, and further providing hypotheses for the empirical study of, the multiple ways by which people respond to art. Despite common agreement that interaction with art can be based on a compelling, and occasionally profound, psychological experience, the nature of these interactions is still under debate. We propose a model, The Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception (VIMAP), with the goal of resolving the multifarious processes that can occur when we perceive and interact with visual art. Specifically, we focus on the need to integrate bottom-up, artwork-derived processes, which have formed the bulk of previous theoretical and empirical assessments, with top-down mechanisms which can describe how individuals adapt or change within their processing experience, and thus how individuals may come to particularly moving, disturbing, transformative, as well as mundane, results. This is achieved by combining several recent lines of theoretical research into a new integrated approach built around three processing checks, which we argue can be used to systematically delineate the possible outcomes in art experience. We also connect our model's processing stages to specific hypotheses for emotional, evaluative, and physiological factors, and address main topics in psychological aesthetics including provocative reactions—chills, awe, thrills, sublime—and difference between “aesthetic” and “everyday” emotional response. Finally, we take the needed step of connecting stages to functional regions in the brain, as well as broader core networks that may coincide with the proposed cognitive checks, and which taken together can serve as a basis for future empirical and theoretical art research.

本文有一个相当大胆的目的：提出一个全面的理论来解释人们对艺术的多种反应方式，并进一步为实证研究提供假设。尽管人们普遍认为与艺术的互动可以基于一种引人入胜的，有时是深刻的心理体验，但这些互动的性质仍在争论中。我们提出了一个模型，即维也纳艺术知觉综合模型（VIMAP），其目标是解决在我们感知视觉艺术并与之互动时可能发生的多种过程。具体来说，我们专注于整合自下而上，源自艺术品的过程的需求，这些过程形成了先前的理论和经验评估的大部分，而自上而下的机制则可以描述个体在其处理体验中如何适应或变化，从而导致个体如何变得特别动人，令人不安，变革性以及平凡。这是通过将近期的几项理论研究结合到围绕三种处理检查建立的新的集成方法中来实现的，我们认为该方法可用于系统地描绘艺术经验中可能出现的结果。我们还将模型的处理阶段与针对情绪，评估和生理因素的特定假设联系起来，并探讨心理美学中的主要主题，包括挑衅性反应（畏惧，敬畏，激动，崇高）以及“审美”和“日常”情绪反应之间的差异。最后，我们采取必要的步骤将各个阶段连接到大脑的功能区域，以及可能与拟议的认知检查相吻合的更广泛的核心网络，