The neural determinants of abstract beauty

Abstract

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we have enquired into the neural activity which correlates with the experience of beauty aroused by abstract paintings consisting of arbitrary assemblies of lines and colours. During the imaging experiments, 18 subjects viewed and rated 120 images of abstract paintings according to how beautiful they perceived them to be. There was a low agreement on the aesthetic classification of these paintings among participants. In contrast, a re-analysis of behavioural data from our previous study on face beauty revealed a much stronger inter-subject agreement for faces compared with abstract art. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed that the experience of beauty when viewing abstract paintings correlated with the emergence of decodable patterns of activity in visual areas implicated in the processing of lines and colours (V1 through V4). Additionally, a parametric univariate analysis revealed higher activity in medial frontal cortex with higher aesthetic appeal. Both univariate and multivariate analyses of the imaging experiments gave broadly similar results to those obtained in previous studies on facial beauty. With abstract art, it was the involvement of visual areas implicated in the processing of lines and colours while with faces it was of visual areas implicated in the processing of faces. Both categories of aesthetic experience correlated with increased activity in medial frontal cortex. We conclude that, as with the experience of beauty in human faces, it is fundamentally the co-operative activity in these two geographically and functionally distant areas of the brain that is the basis for the experience of beauty. Further, this co-operation is enabled by “experience dependent” functional connections, in the sense that currently the existence and high specificity of these connections can only be demonstrated during certain aesthetic experiences. This does not exclude a role in aesthetic experiences for other areas which our imaging experiments have also revealed. We also conclude that the sensory areas of the visual brain have the additional role of participating in the selection of stimuli according to certain significant configurations which make them aesthetically appealing to the observer.