“Stopping for knowledge”: The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle

Abstract

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The Role of Musical Aesthetic Emotions in Social Adaptation to the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…In our view, the hypothesized ability of aesthetic experience to transitorily free the beholders from "wanting" (Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014;Kirsch et al, 2016) supports the re-orienting of attention toward knowledge acquisition (Menninghaus et al, 2017;Sarasso et al, 2020a). In our view, such an "aesthetic attitude" (Stolnitz, 1978) is fundamental in order to accept newly acquired knowledge and to update desired states in an everchanging environment while embracing potentially disturbing or threatening novel sensations and emotions (Sarasso et al, 2020a).…”

“…The previously described knowledge-oriented (Biederman and Vessel, 2006) "aesthetic attitude" prompted by the expectation of aesthetic rewards (e.g., musical pleasure; Ferreri et al, 2019) is related to specific brain activations subserving the link between aesthetic emotions and knowledge acquisition (Schoeller and Perlovsky, 2016;Sarasso et al, 2020a).…”

“…More specifically, recent neurocomputational models suggest that aesthetic appreciation may represent the conscious feedback of successful minimization of prediction errors via the update of predictive representations of the environment (Schmidhuber, 2009; Van de Cruys and Wagemans, 2011; Schoeller and Perlovsky, 2016;Sarasso et al, 2020a). In other words, aesthetic pleasure arises in correspondence with the improvement of the predictions about the incoming sensory stimulation.…”

“…During the perception of more appreciated musical sounds, as an example, automatic defensive motor responses to surprising (i.e., uncertainty arising) stimuli are inhibited . While increased sensory activations are thought to reflect a knowledge-oriented (Biederman and Vessel, 2006) attentional focusing (Vartanian and Goel, 2004;Nadal, 2013) on the object perceptual features, motor inhibition is crucial to slow down action production (Gallese, 2017;Sarasso et al, 2020a). In other words, transient states of motor inhibition free resources to update sensory representations in response to unexpected events (Wessel and Aron, 2017).…”

“…The brain actively minimizes prediction errors either by adapting the sensory environment to our representation through (physical or mental) action or through learning by adapting our representations to the sensory environment (Friston, 2010). The balance in the trade-off between these two possibilities determines dissonance reduction strategies (Kaaronen, 2018) and, as we will explain in the following paragraphs, can be influenced by the aesthetic attitude induced by musical experiences (Sarasso et al, 2020a).…”