Sensory Processing of Art as a Unique Window into Cognitive Mechanisms: Evidence from Behavioral Experiments and fMRI Studies

Pöppel, Ernst; Avram, Mihai; Bao, Yan; Graupmann, Verena; Gutyrchik, Evgeny; Lutz, Aline; Park, Mona; Reiser, Maximilian; Russell, Edmund; Silveira, Sarita; Smigielski, Lukasz; Szymanski, Caroline; Zaytseva, Yuliya

doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.08.517

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Moreover, we found that subjective judgments of ugliness and negative emotions both activated the right IFG (RIFG), which is consistent with a recent finding that ugly pictures activated the IFG (Pöppel et al, 2013). The RIFG plays an important role in attentional control and rapidly adaptations to respond to currently relevant and salient stimuli with inhibitory control (Hampshire et al, 2010).…”

Section: Responsesupporting

confidence: 90%

Associated and dissociated neural substrates of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion during the appreciation of everyday designed products

et al. 2015

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Section: Responsesupporting

confidence: 90%

Associated and dissociated neural substrates of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion during the appreciation of everyday designed products

et al. 2015

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“…Research in the past has shown that by using stimuli from the arts, i.e., from music, poetry or visual arts, one can obtain new insight into cognitive mechanisms which may remain undetected if one focuses only on simple stimulus configurations as have been employed in the tradition of classical psychophysics (e.g., from our own research environment: Silveira et al, 2012 ; Avram et al, 2013 ; Lutz et al, 2013 ; Pöppel et al, 2013 ; Zaytseva et al, 2014 ; Park et al, 2015 ). With the study reported here, we want to further contribute to this research paradigm by comparing the appreciation of art in subjects from the East and the West with its challenging differences ( Pöppel and Bao, 2016 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic Preferences for Eastern and Western Traditional Visual Art: Identity Matters

et al. 2016

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Western and Chinese artists have different traditions in representing the world in their paintings. While Western artists start since the Renaissance to represent the world with a central perspective and focus on salient objects in a scene, Chinese artists concentrate on context information in their paintings, mainly before the mid-19th century. We investigated whether the different typical representations influence the aesthetic preference for traditional Chinese and Western paintings in the different cultural groups. Traditional Chinese and Western paintings were presented randomly for an aesthetic evaluation to Chinese and Western participants. Both Chinese and Western paintings included two categories: landscapes and people in different scenes. Results showed a significant interaction between the source of the painting and the cultural group. For Chinese and Western paintings, a reversed pattern of aesthetic preference was observed: while Chinese participants gave higher aesthetic scores to traditional Chinese paintings than to Western paintings, Western participants tended to give higher aesthetic scores to traditional Western paintings than to Chinese paintings. We interpret this observation as indicator that personal identity is supported and enriched within cultural belongingness. Another important finding was that landscapes were more preferable than people in a scene across different cultural groups indicating a universal principle of preferences for landscapes. Thus, our results suggest that, on the one hand, the way that artists represent the world in their paintings influences the way that culturally embedded viewers perceive and appreciate paintings, but on the other hand, independent of the cultural background, anthropological universals are disclosed by the preference of landscapes.

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“…Artists, he claimed, are particularly good at observing their sensuous impressions (data of sensation) and at figuring out which patterns trigger which interpretations. Although many visual scientists have given up Helmholtz’s theory of vision, the idea that artists test and explore the visual system has not really been abandoned (Pöppel et al, 2013). On the contrary, it allows for a more detailed and discriminating version of the same idea.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic Experiences Across Cultures: Neural Correlates When Viewing Traditional Eastern or Western Landscape Paintings

et al. 2019

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Compared with traditional Western landscape paintings, Chinese traditional landscape paintings usually apply a reversed-geometric perspective and concentrate more on contextual information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we discovered an intracultural bias in the aesthetic appreciation of Western and Eastern traditional landscape paintings in European and Chinese participants. When viewing Western and Eastern landscape paintings in an fMRI scanner, participants showed stronger brain activation to artistic expressions from their own culture. Europeans showed greater activation in visual and sensory-motor brain areas, regions in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and hippocampus when viewing Western compared to Eastern landscape paintings. Chinese participants exhibited greater neural activity in the medial and inferior occipital cortex and regions of the superior parietal lobule in response to Eastern compared to Western landscape paintings. On the behavioral level, the aesthetic judgments also differed between Western and Chinese participants when viewing landscape paintings from different cultures; Western participants showed for instance higher valence values when viewing Western landscapes, while Chinese participants did not show this effect when viewing Chinese landscapes. In general, our findings offer differentiated support for a cultural modulation at the behavioral level and in the neural architecture for high-level aesthetic appreciation.

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Sensory Processing of Art as a Unique Window into Cognitive Mechanisms: Evidence from Behavioral Experiments and fMRI Studies

Cited by 17 publications

References 22 publications

Associated and dissociated neural substrates of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion during the appreciation of everyday designed products

Associated and dissociated neural substrates of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic emotion during the appreciation of everyday designed products

Aesthetic Preferences for Eastern and Western Traditional Visual Art: Identity Matters

Aesthetic Experiences Across Cultures: Neural Correlates When Viewing Traditional Eastern or Western Landscape Paintings

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