The early modernist painters were avid consumers of perception research. It may have been introduced to them by Gertrude Stein, who studied psychology with William James at Harvard, and conducted research on visual attention under his supervision. The Bauhaus designers and artists, too, appreciated perceptual psychology, particularly the contemporary Gestalt school. But the consilience was lost as the two cultures drifted apart, and only recently have they begun to come back together. I predict that the application of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to the arts will become a growth area in criticism and scholarship.

From Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, London: Allen Lane, 2002, pp. 417-418.