Overview
Matthew MacKisack is an art and cultural historian, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter College of Medicine and Health, where he works on the interdisciplinary research project, the Eye’s Mind.
Qualifications
BA (Hons) University of Oxford
PGCE Institute of Education, London
PhD Goldsmiths College, London
Career
Prior to joining the Medical School, Matthew completed a PhD in Art History and Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and gained his BA in English from the University of Oxford.
Research group links
Research
Research interests
Matthew's research focuses primarily on the 18th-century, and artistic and literary responses to the European Enlightenment – but also traces the effects of those changes into modernity and modernism. A third concern is contemporary artistic production, particularly vis-à-vis scientific knowledge.
Interdisciplinarity is central to Matthew's research: in historicizing the relationships between art and social science, bringing cognitive science to bear in art-historical study, and in directly collaborating with scientists and philosophers in research.
His current work assesses the impact of cognitive diversity and neurodiversity on artistic production and reception, and broaches the necessary methodological issue of how to measure this historically.
- 18th-century Art Theory, Aesthetics, and Philosophy
- 20th-century, post-war art, particularly in relation to literature
- Contemporary art and aesthetics
- Cognitive Humanities
- Medical Humanities
- Interdisciplinarity
- Critical Theory
Research projects
- The Eye’s Mind: a study of the neural basis of visual imagination and its role in culture (PI: Prof Adam Zeman)
Links
Publications
Key publications | Publications by category | Publications by year
Publications by category
Journal articles
MacKisack M (2018). Painter and scribe: from model of mind to cognitive strategy.
Cortex,
105, 118-124.
Abstract:
Painter and scribe: from model of mind to cognitive strategy.
Since antiquity the mind has been conceived to operate via images and words. Pre-scientific thinkers (and some scientific) who presented the mind as operating in such a way tended to i) bias one representational mode over the other, and ii) claim the dominance of the mode to be the case universally. The rise of empirical psychological science in the late 19th-century rehearses the word/image division of thought but makes universal statements - e.g. that recollection is a verbal process for everyone - untenable. Since then, the investigation of individual differences and case studies of imagery loss have shown rather that words and images present alternative cognitive "strategies" that individuals will be predisposed to employing - but which, should the necessity arise, can be relearned using the other representational mode. The following sketches out this historical shift in understanding, and concludes by inviting consideration of the wider context in which discussion of the relationships between 'images' and 'words' (as both internal and external forms of representation) must take place.
Abstract.
Author URL.
Zeman A, MacKisack M, Onians J (2018). The Eye's mind - Visual imagination, neuroscience and the humanities.
Cortex,
105, 1-3.
Author URL.
Full text.
Winlove C, Milton F, Ranson J, Fulford J, MacKisack M, Macpherson F, Zeman AZJ (2018). The neural correlates of visual imagery: a co-ordinate-based meta-analysis.
Cortex,
105, 4-25.
Full text.
MacKisack M (2016). Differential Imagery Experience and Ut Pictura Poesis in the 18th-century.
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS,
41(4), 319-331.
Author URL.
MacKisack M, Aldworth S, Macpherson F, Onians J, Winlove C, Zeman A (2016). On Picturing a Candle: the Prehistory of Imagery Science.
Front Psychol,
7Abstract:
On Picturing a Candle: the Prehistory of Imagery Science.
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical - and even psychological - reckoning with imagery and its parent concept 'imagination'. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination's intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for - and presents challenges to - the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature's most commonly used task - imagining a concrete object - and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates.
Abstract.
Author URL.
Full text.
Publications by year
2018
MacKisack M (2018). Painter and scribe: from model of mind to cognitive strategy.
Cortex,
105, 118-124.
Abstract:
Painter and scribe: from model of mind to cognitive strategy.
Since antiquity the mind has been conceived to operate via images and words. Pre-scientific thinkers (and some scientific) who presented the mind as operating in such a way tended to i) bias one representational mode over the other, and ii) claim the dominance of the mode to be the case universally. The rise of empirical psychological science in the late 19th-century rehearses the word/image division of thought but makes universal statements - e.g. that recollection is a verbal process for everyone - untenable. Since then, the investigation of individual differences and case studies of imagery loss have shown rather that words and images present alternative cognitive "strategies" that individuals will be predisposed to employing - but which, should the necessity arise, can be relearned using the other representational mode. The following sketches out this historical shift in understanding, and concludes by inviting consideration of the wider context in which discussion of the relationships between 'images' and 'words' (as both internal and external forms of representation) must take place.
Abstract.
Author URL.
Zeman A, MacKisack M, Onians J (2018). The Eye's mind - Visual imagination, neuroscience and the humanities.
Cortex,
105, 1-3.
Author URL.
Full text.
Winlove C, Milton F, Ranson J, Fulford J, MacKisack M, Macpherson F, Zeman AZJ (2018). The neural correlates of visual imagery: a co-ordinate-based meta-analysis.
Cortex,
105, 4-25.
Full text.
2016
MacKisack M (2016). Differential Imagery Experience and Ut Pictura Poesis in the 18th-century.
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS,
41(4), 319-331.
Author URL.
MacKisack M, Aldworth S, Macpherson F, Onians J, Winlove C, Zeman A (2016). On Picturing a Candle: the Prehistory of Imagery Science.
Front Psychol,
7Abstract:
On Picturing a Candle: the Prehistory of Imagery Science.
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical - and even psychological - reckoning with imagery and its parent concept 'imagination'. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination's intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for - and presents challenges to - the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature's most commonly used task - imagining a concrete object - and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates.
Abstract.
Author URL.
Full text.
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