Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments : The aesthetic episode – Developments and challenges in empirical aesthetics

Abstract

About a decade ago, psychology of the arts started to gain momentum owing to a number of drives: technological progress improved the conditions under which art could be studied in the laboratory, neuroscience discovered the arts as an area of interest, and new theories offered a more comprehensive look at aesthetic experiences. Ten years ago, Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin (2004) proposed a descriptive information-processing model of the components that integrate an aesthetic episode. This theory offered explanations for modern art's large number of individualized styles, innovativeness, and for the diverse aesthetic experiences it can stimulate. In addition, it described how information is processed over the time course of an aesthetic episode, within and over perceptual, cognitive and emotional components. Here, we review the current state of the model, and its relation to the major topics in empirical aesthetics today, including the nature of aesthetic emotions, the role of context, and the neural and evolutionary foundations of art and aesthetics.

Buildings, Beauty, and the Brain: A Neuroscience of Architectural Experience

“…Investigators have probed early and a slightly later response to artwork, but such research is still confined to experiences that last less than a few seconds in duration (Cela-Conde et al, 2013). There is recognition that aesthetic experiences vary over longer durations than a few seconds (Chatterjee, 2014;Leder & Nadal, 2014), although the average museum patron spends less than 20 sec engaging with works of art (Smith, Smith, & Tinio, 2017;Smith & Smith, 2001). Architectural encounters, by contrast, tend to be prolonged and are often habitual in the case of frequently visited buildings like one's home, school, or office.…”

The line model of form and emotion: Perspectives on Western design

“…The model proposed by Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin (2004) considered the experience of art or form to be constructed by a complex system of feedback, where an analysis of the form, emotional affective state, memory, prior knowledge, and social setting all play a role in a resultant aesthetic judgment and emotion. In an updated version, more prominence was given to the emotional affective state of the observer as the driver of the overall experience (Leder & Nadal, 2014).…”

The imaginative mind

“…For instance, the most influential theories that have been formulated to explain the neuroaesthetics of visual art and music are both multi-stage models where aesthetic experience is held to be orchestrated by a distributed set of neural networks devoted to different aspects of perceptual, cognitive and emotional information processing (Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014;Leder and Nadal, 2014).…”