Neurocognitive Decoding of Aesthetic Appreciation

García-Prieto, Juan; Pereda, Ernesto; Maestú, Fernando

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-32265-0_6

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 104 publications

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“…In turn, we did not observe any significant (or even below-significant threshold) activation in other areas of the reward system that have been implied in other studies of musical aesthetic responses (specifically, pleasure) such as ventral striatum, cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (for reviews, see Robert J. Zatorre and Salimpoor 2013; Reybrouck, Vuust, and Brattico 2018; García-Prieto, Pereda, and Maestú 2016). This might be related to the original goal of the study, namely to search for the invariant neural features associated to musical beauty, which are independent of sensory processing and related pleasurable responses to sounds and independent of the listener’s background.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 45%

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

Brattico

Brusa

Dietz

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Evaluative beauty judgments are very common, but in spite of this commonality, are rarely studied in cognitive neuroscience. Here we investigated the neural and musical attributes of musical beauty using a naturalistic free-listening paradigm applied to behavioral and neuroimaging recordings and validated by experts' judgments. In Study 1, 30 Western healthy adult participants rated continuously the perceived beauty of three musical pieces using a motion sensor. This allowed us to identify the passages in the three musical pieces that were inter-subjectively judged as beautiful or ugly. This informed the analysis for Study 2, where additional 36 participants were recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened attentively to the same musical pieces as in Study 1. In Study 3, in order to identify the musicological features characterizing the passages that were consistently rated as beautiful or ugly in Study 1, we collected post-hoc questionnaires from 12 music-composition experts. Results from Study 2 evidenced focal regional activity in the orbitofrontal brain structure when listening to beautiful passages of music, irrespectively of the subjective reactions and individual listening biographies. In turn, the moments in the music that were consistently rated as ugly were associated with bilateral supratemporal activity. Effective connectivity analysis also discovered inhibition of auditory activation and neural communication with orbitofrontal cortex, especially in the right hemisphere, during listening to beautiful musical passages as opposed to intrinsic activation of auditory cortices and decreased coupling to orbitofrontal cortex during listening to ugly musical passages. Experts' questionnaires indicated that the beautiful passages were more melodic, calm, sad, slow, tonal, traditional and simple than the ones negatively valenced. In sum, we identified a neural mechanism for inter-subjective beauty judgments of music in the supratemporal-orbitofrontal circuit, irrespectively of individual taste and listening biography. Furthermore, some invariance in objective musical attributes of beautiful and ugly passages was evidenced. Future studies might address the generalizability of the findings to non-Western listeners.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 45%

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

Brattico

Brusa

Dietz

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…For millennia, questions concerning art and aesthetic experiences have been debated (Danto, 1964;Bell, 1914;Collingwood, 1958;Else, 1938) and continue to drive real-life behaviour via attendance to museums, galleries and live performances. Neuroaesthetics research has identified the involvement of widespread brain networks spanning visual, motor affective and cognitive information processing units during aesthetic judgments (Boccia et al, 2016;Brown et al, 2011;Cattaneo, 2019Cattaneo, , 2020Chatterjee, 2003;García-Prieto et al, 2016;Kirsch et al, 2016;Pearce et al, 2016). However, current understanding of how the brain constructs aesthetic experiences is in its infancy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional specificity and neural integration in the aesthetic appreciation of artworks with implied motion

Bara

Darda

Kurz

et al. 2021

Eur J of Neuroscience

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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 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.

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“…Historically, questions about art and beauty have been discussed so continually and impassionedly that it is considered “hard to find a prominent figure in the history of philosophy who has not been him- or herself concerned with the notion of beauty and aesthetic pleasure” (García-Prieto, Pereda, & Maestú, 2016, p. 87). What makes these questions worth pursuing is most likely a sensation like pleasure or enjoyment (Graham, 2005, p. 3), which is often associated with the creation or appreciation of art.…”

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confidence: 99%

Viewers recognize the process of creating artworks with admiration: Evidence from experimental manipulation of prior experience.

Matsumoto

Okada

2021

Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts

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This study examined the role of recognizing the process of creating an artwork in cognitive processes of art viewing. To this end, we conducted 2 experiments in which participants’ prior experience was manipulated and investigated whether and how creative experience influences subsequent cognitive processes while viewing artworks. Study 1 (N = 45) revealed that having creative experience before art viewing changes viewers’ recognition of the process of creating the artwork and causes them to have a more positive impression of artworks. It was also revealed that these 2 changes are correlated. In particular, the emotion of admiration, which is considered a kind of social emotion, was found to be highly correlated with the recognition of assessed difficulty of creation. Study 2 (N = 38) tested the generalizability of that phenomenon by extending types of stimuli and investigated the cognitive mechanism behind it in a more detailed way using protocol analysis. The results showed that the effect appears, regardless of artwork type, and provided support to explain the mechanism in terms of viewers’ degree of confidence. These results suggest it is important to consider recognition of the process of creating an artwork when addressing art appreciation.

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Neurocognitive Decoding of Aesthetic Appreciation

Cited by 3 publications

References 104 publications

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

Beauty and the brain: Investigating the neural and musical attributes of beauty during a naturalistic music listening experience

Functional specificity and neural integration in the aesthetic appreciation of artworks with implied motion

Viewers recognize the process of creating artworks with admiration: Evidence from experimental manipulation of prior experience.

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