Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that is concerned with understanding the biological bases of aesthetic experiences. These experiences involve appraisals of natural objects, artifacts, and environments. Because aesthetic encounters are common in everyday life, exploration of their biological bases can deepen our understanding of human behavior in important domains such as mate selection, consumer behavior, communication, and art. We review recent evidence showing that aesthetic experiences emerge from the interaction between sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge neural systems. Neuroaesthetics draws from and informs traditional areas of cognitive neuroscience including perception, emotion, semantics, attention, and decision-making. The discipline is at a historical inflection point and is poised to enter the mainstream of scientific inquiry.

On average, we urban dwellers spend about 90% of our time indoors, and share the intuition that the physical features of the places we live and work in influence how we feel and act. However, there is surprisingly little research on how architecture impacts behavior, much less on how it influences brain function. To begin closing this gap, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to examine how systematic variation in contour impacts aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions, outcome measures of interest to both architects and users of spaces alike. As predicted, participants were more likely to judge spaces as beautiful if they were curvilinear than rectilinear. Neuroanatomically, when contemplating beauty, curvilinear contour activated the anterior cingulate cortex exclusively, a region strongly responsive to the reward properties and emotional salience of objects. Complementing this finding, pleasantness-the valence dimension of the affect circumplex-accounted for nearly 60% of the variance in beauty ratings. Furthermore, activation in a distributed brain network known to underlie the aesthetic evaluation of different types of visual stimuli covaried with beauty ratings. In contrast, contour did not affect approach-avoidance decisions, although curvilinear spaces activated the visual cortex. The results suggest that the well-established effect of contour on aesthetic preference can be extended to architecture. Furthermore, the combination of our behavioral and neural evidence underscores the role of emotion in our preference for curvilinear objects in this domain.neuroaesthetics | design | curvature | habitat theory

A study was conducted to determine the neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic preference for paintings using fMRI. Subjects were shown representational and abstract paintings in different formats (original, altered, filtered), and instructed to rate them on aesthetic preference. Our primary results demonstrated that activation in right caudate nucleus decreased in response to decreasing preference, and that activation in bilateral occipital gyri, left cingulate sulcus, and bilateral fusiform gyri increased in response to increasing preference. We conclude that the differential patterns of activation observed in the aforementioned structures in response to aesthetic preference are specific examples of their roles in evaluating reward-based stimuli that vary in emotional valence.