Framing wellbeing and societal challenge mechanisms via distinct outcomes of art experience? A brief revisit to the VIMAP

In this brief contribution—happily afforded by the 20th anniversary of Physics of Life Reviews—we take the opportunity to reflect on our earlier published paper, which had introduced a theoretical framework, the VIMAP (Vienna Integrated Model of (Top-Down and Bottom-up processes in) Art Perception; (Pelowski et al., [1])) that has come to represent a major basis for organizing, anticipating, and empirically investigating the nuanced, multivariate visual art experience. We look back at the original model and its hypotheses, especially as these regard distinct "outcomes," which we had argued may provide a superstructure of supraordinate, shared varieties of art experience detected across individual meetings of viewer, context, and artworks. In the present paper we consider whether these outcomes could also be a useful tool for approaching new demands across multiple art-related areas that have strengthened in the years since the original publication regarding applying the arts to wellbeing, societal challenges, and health. All of which require a framework for better understanding and testing the nuanced features of individual-centered art experience. We briefly—and admitedly very speculatively—consider how these new topics could be fit to the VIMAP [2]. Guided also by new evidence from our team that has provided a bottom-up verification of the specified outcome types and their implications, we provide a working set of suggestions whereby we might connect wellbeing- or attitude/behavioral change-related targets to the specific VIMAP outcomes, which we argue may provide a powerful mechanistic structure for future research.