Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise: A parametric fMRI study

Kirk, Ulrich; Skov, Martin; Christensen, Mark Schram; Nygaard, Niels O.

doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2008.08.004

Cited by 186 publications

(151 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…These experiments demonstrated common engagement of prefrontal cortices when subjects viewed aesthetically pleasing paintings, as opposed to paintings they disliked, regardless of the category of painting (Cela-Conde et al 2004;Kawabata and Zeki 2004;Vartanian and Goel 2004). More recent work has demonstrated that activity within these areas is significantly biased by subjects' prior expectations about the hedonic value of stimuli (Kirk et al 2009). These authors demonstrate how a number of external factors can bias brain activation while viewing art works, which was then associated with less impartial aesthetic judgments.…”

Section: Part Ii: Neuroaesthetics: a Neuroscientific Portrait Of Artmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…The fact that external influences can bias brain activity and consequent aesthetic judgments might offer a scientific explanation as to why we may come to reevaluate more positively a work of art we initially disliked (for example, when we realize who the artist is and that the artist is universally respected or when a work of art is located in a renowned art gallery, cf. Kirk et al 2009). …”

Section: Part Ii: Neuroaesthetics: a Neuroscientific Portrait Of Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neuroaesthetics and beyond: new horizons in applying the science of the brain to the art of dance

Cross

Ticini

2011

Phenom Cogn Sci

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Throughout history, dance has maintained a critical presence across all human cultures, defying barriers of class, race, and status. How dance has synergistically co-evolved with humans has fueled a rich debate on the function of art and the essence of aesthetic experience, engaging numerous artists, historians, philosophers, and scientists. While dance shares many features with other art forms, one attribute unique to dance is that it is most commonly expressed with the human body. Because of this, social scientists and neuroscientists are turning to dance and dancers to help answer questions of how the brain coordinates the body to perform complex, precise, and beautiful movements. In the present paper, we discuss how recent advances in neuroscientific methods provide the tools to advance our understanding of not only the cerebral phenomena associated with dance learning and observation but also the neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation associated with watching dance. We suggest that future work within the fields of dance neuroscience and neuroaesthetics have the potential to provide mutual benefits to both the scientific and artistic communities.

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Section: Part Ii: Neuroaesthetics: a Neuroscientific Portrait Of Artmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Part Ii: Neuroaesthetics: a Neuroscientific Portrait Of Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroaesthetics and beyond: new horizons in applying the science of the brain to the art of dance

Cross

Ticini

2011

Phenom Cogn Sci

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“…A number of studies have already begun to address this issue. For example, it has been shown that among architects, neural activation in the OFC and subcallosal cingulate gyrus was higher when assessing the aesthetic value of buildings compared with nonarchitects (77), suggesting that expertise moderates the neural representation of value in the reward network. Furthermore, compared with nonarchitecture students, architecture students recruit fewer brain structures for encoding and detecting building stimuli (78), suggesting that their expertise might confer an advantage in terms of neural efficiency in processing domain-specific content.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architecture

Vartanian

Navarrete

Chatterjee

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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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

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“…Thus, it has been found that the esthetic experience involves a widely distributed circuit with greater activation for beautiful stimuli in anterior cingulate gyrus, dorsolateral and medial frontal cortices (Berridge and Kringelbach, 2008;Breiter et al, 2001;Di Dio et al, 2011;Kirk et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

Righi

Orlando

Marzi

2014

International Journal of Psychophysiology

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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. The relation between attractiveness and motor affordance is a key topic in design and has not yet been investigated electrophysiologically. In this respect, action affordance and attractiveness represent two crucial dimensions in object processing (specifically for tools). In light of this evidence, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) enabled us to gain new insights into the time course of the interaction between these two dimensions during an explicit tool evaluation task. Behaviorally, tools that were judged as high affording and high attractive yielded faster response times than those judged as low affording and low attractive. The ERP results showed that early processes related to sensory gating and feature extraction (N100) were sensitive to both affordance and attractiveness; the P200 was dominated by affordance, indexing a facilitated access to motor action representation. The N300, P300 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) showed enhanced responses for highly affording/attractive tools, reflecting the interconnection between attractiveness and affordance. Later responses were entirely affected by attractiveness, suggesting additional affective responses evoked by desirable tools. We are showing that things that are perceived as more functional and attractive have a privileged neural activation in the time course of tool evaluation, for the first time.

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Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise: A parametric fMRI study

Cited by 186 publications

References 81 publications

Neuroaesthetics and beyond: new horizons in applying the science of the brain to the art of dance

Neuroaesthetics and beyond: new horizons in applying the science of the brain to the art of dance

Impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architecture

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

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