ABSTRACT
How does an aesthetic experience get processed? Building on the work of several other contemporary philosophers, I assume the aesthetic experience to be an instance of the larger category of perceptual experience. But an appeal to traditional perception theories that depend on the mutual exclusivity of perception and cognition won’t explain the aesthetic experience. This is both because they hierarchize perception and cognition, prioritizing one or the other, and because they begin with a static and antecedently defined object and thus struggle to explain the interaction between object and perceiver. The solution is found in an understanding of gist, which is the first approximately 200–300 msec of perception. Gist is whole-scene experience and not of discrete objects. It shares features with both perception and cognition, and can thus serve as the interface between the two faculties, allowing cognition to (at some later milliseconds) affect perception, while at other times (in the first ≤100 ms) giving the perceptual data more directly to the perceiver. Because different kinds of assessment are accomplished at different stages of the gist experience, it can be shown that gist guarantees both a stable, objective reality and leaves room for the flexibility that comes with cognitive penetration. The aesthetic experience is the paradigm example of gist experience that provides for both objective-world stability and socially generated originality.
