Visual Conventions, Predictive Embodied Processing, and Cultural Epigenetics

<p>In previous articles, I outlined how visual conventions of camera movement—executed with the help of a Steadicam in particular—need to be analyzed not only as conventions of visual art, subject to changes in style, market mechanisms, and aesthetic preferences, but also as subject to undergirding processes linked to embodied cognition that connect sensorimotor experiences to abstract pattern recognition. I also suggested that underneath, yet another process is at work that involves epigenetic inheritance on the level of allele changes in the neurobiological structure of our brain cells. Bringing this research together, this new article will look at how exactly these different layers interact in a reciprocal bottom-up and top-down system, proposing a three-layered working model to analyze said processes. I will also provide a brief example of how this model can be put into practice to help us understand the complex interaction between stylistic, cognitive, and (neuro)biological elements at work in visual conventions of film and other visual arts.</p>