Although there is growing interest in the neural foundations of aesthetic experience, it remains unclear how particular mental sub-systems (e.g., perceptual, affective, cognitive) are involved in different types of aesthetic judgments. Here we use fMRI to investigate the involvement of different neural networks during aesthetic judgments of visual artworks with implied motion cues. First, a behavioural experiment (N=45) confirmed a preference for paintings with implied motion over static cues. Subsequently, in a pre-registered fMRI experiment (N=27), participants made aesthetic and motion judgments towards paintings representing human bodies in dynamic and static postures. Using functional region-of-interest and Bayesian multilevel modelling approaches, we provide no compelling evidence for unique sensitivity within or between neural systems associated with body perception, motion and affective processing during the aesthetic evaluation of paintings with implied motion. However, we show suggestive evidence that motion and body-selective systems may integrate signals via functional connections with a separate neural network in dorsal parietal cortex, which may act as a relay or integration site. Our findings clarify the roles of basic visual and affective brain circuitry in evaluating a central aesthetic feature -implied motionwhilst also pointing towards promising future research directions, which involve modelling aesthetic preferences as hierarchical interplay between visual and affective circuits and integration processes in frontoparietal cortex.

To date, neuroaesthetics research has primarily framed aesthetic experiences as a special case of cognition. In the current paper, we argue that the dominance of this specialised approach needs rethinking. Instead, we propose a generalised framework that is inspired by the semantic cognition literature and that treats aesthetic experience as just one way to gain meaning from the environment, rather than as a special case. According to our framework, aesthetic experiences are underpinned by the same cognitive and brain systems that are involved in deriving meaning from the environment in general, such as modality-specific conceptual representations and controlled processes for retrieving the appropriate type of information. By embracing broader and more mature fields of research within cognitive neuroscience, our generalised semantic cognition view of aesthetic experience has substantial implications for theory development; it leads to novel, falsifiable predictions and it reconfigures a central debate by forcing researchers to assess foundational assumptions regarding the specificity of systems that may be involved in aesthetic experiences.

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Although there is growing interest in the neural foundations of aesthetic experience, it remains unclear how particular mental sub-systems (e.g., perceptual, affective, cognitive) are involved in different types of aesthetic judgments. Here we use fMRI to investigate the involvement of different neural networks during aesthetic judgments of visual artworks with implied motion cues. First, a behavioural experiment (N=45) confirmed a preference for paintings with implied motion over static cues. Subsequently, in a pre-registered fMRI experiment (N=27), participants made aesthetic and motion judgments towards paintings representing human bodies in dynamic and static postures. Using functional region-of-interest and Bayesian multilevel modelling approaches, we show clear functional differences in the way motion, body-image and affective processing systems contribute to aesthetic judgments. Visual motion and body-selective regions were sensitive to implied motion cues, but only body-selective regions showed sensitivity to aesthetic judgments. In contrast, within the affective network, bilateral anterior cingulate cortex showed more sensitivity to the aesthetic than control task. In addition, we show suggestive evidence that motion and body-selective systems may integrate signals via functional connections with a separate neural network in dorsal parietal cortex, which may act as a relay or integration site. Our findings clarify the roles of basic visual and affective brain circuitry in evaluating a central aesthetic feature – implied motion – whilst also pointing towards promising future research directions, which involve modelling aesthetic preferences as hierarchical interplay between visual and affective circuits and integration processes in frontoparietal cortex.

Aesthetic judgments dominate much of daily life by guiding how we evaluate objects, people, and experiences in our environment. One key question that remains unanswered is the extent to which more specialised or largely general cognitive resources support aesthetic judgments. To investigate this question in the context of executive resources, we examined the extent to which a central working memory load produces similar or different reaction time interference on aesthetic compared to non-aesthetic judgments. Across three pre-registered experiments that used Bayesian multi-level modelling approaches (N>100 per experiment), we found clear evidence that a central working memory load produces similar reaction time interference on aesthetic judgments relative to non-aesthetic (motion) judgments. We also showed that this similarity in processing across aesthetic versus non-aesthetic judgments holds across variations in the form of art (people vs landscape; Exps. 1-3), medium type (artwork vs photographs; Exp. 2) and load content (art images vs letters; Exps. 1-3). These findings suggest that across a range of experimental contexts, as well as different processing streams in working memory (e.g., visual vs verbal), aesthetic and motion judgments commonly rely on a domain-general executive system, rather than a system that is more specifically tied to aesthetic judgments. In doing so, these findings shine new light on the cognitive architecture that supports aesthetic judgments, as well as how domain-general executive systems operate more generally in cognition.