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HWS News

23 January 2025 • Faculty • Research • STEM Seeing and Feeling By Andrew Wickenden '09

Associate Professor of Psychological Science Dan Graham’s most recent research explores the connections between what people see and how they feel about what they’re looking at.

Read "The Perceptual Primacy of Feeling" 

“Looking at the world often involves not just seeing things but feeling things.”

From this premise, Associate Professor of Psychological Science Dan Graham and his colleagues have been exploring the relationship between visual perception and affective experience using modern deep neural networks. Their study, “The Perceptual Primacy of Feeling: Affectless machine vision models explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect,” appears in the most recent issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

The authors note that psychological theories about the sight-feeling relationship “often focus mostly on the role of changes in our bodily states (physiology) or on our conscious thoughts about the things we’re seeing (cognition). Far less frequently do these theories focus on the role of seeing itself (perception).”

Using deep neural network models, the study reveals that machine vision systems with “neither bodily states nor conscious thoughts…can predict with remarkably accuracy how humans will feel about the things they look at. This suggests that perceptual processes (built on rich sensory experiences) may shape what we feel about the world around us far more than many psychological theories suggest.”

Alongside Graham, the study was authored by Colin Conwell, now at Johns Hopkins University, Department of Cognitive Science; Chelsea Boccagno of the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and Edward A. Vessel of the City College of New York’s Department of Psychology.
 
This project grew out of a conference talk regarding information theory and aesthetics that Graham gave at the 2018 International Association for Empirical Aesthetics conference in Toronto, co-authored by Lauren Pomerantz ’18, a neuroscience individual major who was a researcher in Graham’s lab.
 
“Ed Vessel came up to me after the talk with the basic idea that became this paper, and a collaboration was born,” Graham says. “We soon enlisted Colin Conwell, then a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, to test models and collect data. Colin took the idea and absolutely ran with it, with help from Chelsea Boccagno. It has been quite a journey, and it is a joy to see this work published.” With his coauthors, Graham recently delivered a presentation on their research at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Conference at MIT in August.
 

Graham is the author of An Internet in Your Head, which argues that the best metaphor for the human brain is the internet, and the Psychology Today blog, Your Internet Brain. Focusing especially on vision coding, his research investigates human and mammal brains from a variety of perspectives using computational, behavioral, and theoretical approaches. This work explores the ways natural, aesthetic, and artistic stimuli are processed and creation, and the fundamental principles of communication among neurons in mammal brain. Tying these strands together is the notion of efficiency: neural systems are shaped by evolutionary adaptation, which tends to produce solutions that are well matched to environmental demands. 

Graham’s scholarship has previously appeared in Network Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Vision Research, among other journals. A member of the HWS faculty since 2012, he earned his B.A. in physics from Middlebury College and his M.S. in physics and Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell University.