Two-Stage Processing of Aesthetic Information in the Human Brain Revealed by Neural Adaptation Paradigm

Abstract

Some researchers in aesthetics assume visual features related to aesthetic perception (e.g. golden ratio and symmetry) commonly embedded in masterpieces. If this is true, an intriguing hypothesis is that the human brain has neural circuitry specialized for the processing of visual beauty. We presently tested this hypothesis by combining a neuroimaging technique with the repetition suppression (RS) paradigm. Subjects (non-experts in art) viewed two images of sculptures sequentially presented. Some sculptures obeyed the golden ratio (canonical images), while the golden proportion were impaired in other sculptures (deformed images). We found that the occipito-temporal cortex in the right hemisphere showed the RS when a canonical sculpture (e.g. Venus de Milo) was repeatedly presented, but not when its deformed version was repeated. Furthermore, the right parietal cortex showed the RS to the canonical proportion even when two sculptures had different identities (e.g. Venus de Milo as the first stimulus and David di Michelangelo as the second), indicating that this region encodes the golden ratio as an abstract rule shared by different sculptures. Those results suggest two separate stages of neural processing for aesthetic information (one in the occipito-temporal and another in the parietal regions) that are hierarchically arranged in the human brain.

Review of computational neuroaesthetics: bridging the gap between neuroaesthetics and computer science

“…This connectivity might reflect the dynamic process for the visual and aesthetic properties of faces. In 2018, Iwasaki studied the aesthetic perception of visual features by comparing sculptures obeyed the golden ration (canonical sculpture) with sculptures in which golden ratio was impaired (deformed sculpture) [95]. They found that the connectivity between the right occipital-temporal region and the right parietal region was correlated with the presentation of canonical sculptures but not for deformed sculptures, suggesting a neural pathway between these regions during the processing for aesthetic information.…”