The impact of crossmodal predictions on the neural processing of aesthetic stimuli

Abstract

Neuroaesthetic research has focused on neural predictive processes involved in the encounter with art stimuli or the related evaluative judgements, and it has been mainly conducted unimodally. Here, with electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography and an affective priming protocol, we investigated whether and how the neural responses to non-representational aesthetic stimuli are top-down modulated by affective representational (i.e. semantically meaningful) predictions between audition and vision. Also, the neural chronometry of affect processing of these aesthetic stimuli was investigated. We hypothesized that the early affective components of crossmodal aesthetic responses are dependent on the affective and representational predictions formed in another sensory modality resulting in differentiated brain responses, and that audition and vision indicate different processing latencies for affect. The target stimuli were aesthetic visual patterns and musical chords, and they were preceded by a prime from the opposing sensory modality. We found that early auditory-cortex responses to chords were more affected by valence than the corresponding visual-cortex ones. Furthermore, the assessments of visual targets were more facilitated by affective congruency of crossmodal primes than the acoustic targets. These results indicate, first, that the brain uses early affective information for predictively guiding aesthetic responses; second, that an affective transfer of information takes place crossmodally, mainly from audition to vision, impacting the aesthetic assessment. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter

“…The first part of the issue, entitled “General Issues”, gathers contributions that clarify the conceptual bases of the encounter between PP and aesthetics and expand it in new directions [ 98 , 142 , 148 , 149 ]. The three parts that follow—devoted to “Visual Art” [ 63 , 123 ], “Music” [ 102 , 132 , 133 ] and “Literature, Narrative and Cinema” [ 56 , 95 , 96 , 125 ] respectively—offer an articulate picture of the insights that PP can provide when applied to different art forms (including some that have so far been little or never explored from a PP perspective), and what in turn these art forms, when considered from a PP perspective, can tell us about our mental functioning. The last part, entitled “Responses and Critical Perspectives” contains papers that compare the PP picture of our aesthetic encounters with other leading proposals in the field and provide useful criticisms and indications for future research [ 64 , 107 , 108 ].…”

“…Psychologists and neuroscientists moving within the PP approach are starting to use this expertise for their theoretical and empirical work (see e.g. [55,56,97,[131][132][133]). Here again the insights of artists and aestheticians, complemented by the Bayesian apparatus of PP, promise to deliver fine-grained pictures of how feelings like confusion, surprise, curiosity, boredom, insight, etc., are generated, evolve over time, and can be managed by the sort of designer environments we humans build and inhabit.…”

The aesthetic experience of general beauty and ugly-cute memes: the role of emotion

“…Aesthetic objects possess unique stimulus features that can elicit specific emotions or emotional responses in observers ( Menninghaus et al, 2019 ). Emotions play a significant cognitive role and have an important influence on aesthetic judgment ( Tiihonen et al, 2024 ). Individuals experience pleasurable emotions when appreciating nature, artworks, and other human creations ( Armstrong and Detweiler-Bedell, 2008 ).…”