Arthur P. Shimamura is a professor of psychology and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the neural basis of human memory and cognition. He received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Larry Squire, where he studied amnesic patients. In 1989, Shimamura began his professorship at UC Berkeley. He has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, was a founding member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and has been science advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium science museum.
In 2008, Shimamura received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship to explore links between art, mind, and brain. He and Stephen Palmer co-edited Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, which includes chapters from philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists. His book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder, considers the perceptual, conceptual, and emotional features of the way we look at art. In 2013, Shimamura edited a volume, Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, which introduces psychocinematics, the term he coined for scientific investigations of the psychological and biological features of film.
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