Art for reward's sake: Visual art recruits the ventral striatum

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013

Artworks provide sets of sensory stimuli that allow special insights into cognitive processes complementing results obtained with other experimental paradigms. Examples are given from visual art and music using behavioral measures and neuroimaging technology (fMRI). The following topics are addressed: creation and maintenance of personal identity, difference or equivalence of aesthetic and moral judgments, appreciation of Eastern and Western visual art, differences in sensory processing of naturalistic and surrealistic art, importance and traps of mental frames and prejudices, effect of emotional priming on the central representation of sensory stimuli, value of single case studies, personality characteristics as predictors, and usefulness of controlled introspection in analyzing contents of episodic memory, in particular with respect to aesthetic and health-promoting appreciation of environments. Furthermore, the necessary distinction between anthropological universals and cultural or individual specifics is stressed in sensory processing of artworks.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2013

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework.

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014

Several studies have investigated neural correlates of aesthetic appreciation for paintings but to date the findings have been heterogeneous. This heterogeneity may be attributed to previous studies' measurement of aesthetic appreciation of not only the beauty of paintings but also the beauty of motifs of the paintings. In order to better elucidate the beauty of paintings, it seems necessary to compare aesthetic appreciation of paintings and photographic analogs which included corresponding real images. We prepared for famous painters' pictures and their photographic analogs which were set up to resemble each painting in order to investigate the hypothesis that there exist specific neural correlates associated with the aesthetic appreciation for paintings. Forty-four subjects participated in functional magnetic resonance study which required comparisons of aesthetic appreciation of paintings of still life and landscape versus photographic analogs including corresponding real...

Neuroimage, 2009

Brain and Cognition, 2014

Many studies involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have exposed participants to paintings under varying task demands. To isolate neural systems that are activated reliably across fMRI studies in response to viewing paintings regardless of variation in task demands, a quantitative metaanalysis of fifteen experiments using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method was conducted. As predicted, viewing paintings was correlated with activation in a distributed system including the occipital lobes, temporal lobe structures in the ventral stream involved in object (fusiform gyrus) and scene (parahippocampal gyrus) perception, and the anterior insula-a key structure in experience of emotion. In addition, we also observed activation in the posterior cingulate cortex bilaterally-part of the brain's default network. These results suggest that viewing paintings engages not only systems involved in visual representation and object recognition, but also structures underlying emotions and internalized cognitions.

It is an open question whether preferences for visual art can be lawfully predicted from the basic constituent elements of a visual image. Moreover, little is known about how such preferences are actually constructed in the brain. Here we developed and tested a computational framework to gain an understanding of how the human brain constructs aesthetic value. We show that it is possible to explain human preferences for a piece of art based on an analysis of features present in the image. This was achieved by analyzing the visual properties of drawings and photographs by multiple means, ranging from image statistics extracted by computer vision tools, subjective human ratings about attributes, to a deep convolutional neural network. Crucially, it is possible to predict subjective value ratings not only within but also across individuals, speaking to the possibility that much of the variance in human visual preference is shared across individuals. Neuroimaging data revealed that prefe...

Brain Research, 2007

The present study was conducted to determine the functional neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic experience using slow cortical potentials (SCPs). Thirty participants without any particular background in the fine arts were presented with various representational (semiabstract) and abstract paintings dating from the 20th and 21st century in two experimental conditions, i.e. with or without stylistic information. The paintings had to be rated by the participants in terms of understanding and aesthetic qualities. In order to identify the cortical structures involved, the SCPs were subjected to current density analysis using lowresolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA). The comparison of representational and abstract paintings revealed significantly higher activation for representational artworks in several regions of the brain, predominantly in the left frontal lobe and bilaterally in the temporal lobes. According to the participants' reports, the representational artwork stimuli evoked more associations, accompanied by stronger activation of multimodal association areas in the temporal lobe. Furthermore, without stylistic information, the stimuli evoked stronger activation mainly in the left frontal and parietal lobes. Results also showed that stylistic information led to a better understanding of the paintings, but resulted in reduced cortical activation in the left hemisphere. This might have been due to less verbally oriented processing. These observations help explain the difficulties many beholders often have in appreciating abstract artworks.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2011

In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, where we investigated the neural correlates of esthetic experience, we found that observing canonical sculptures, relative to sculptures whose proportions had been modified, produced the activation of a network that included the lateral occipital gyrus, precuneus, prefrontal areas, and, most interestingly, the right anterior insula. We interpreted this latter activation as the neural signature underpinning hedonic response during esthetic experience. With the aim of exploring whether this specific hedonic response is also present during the observation of non-art biological stimuli, in the present fMRI study we compared the activations associated with viewing masterpieces of classical sculpture with those produced by the observation of pictures of young athletes. The two stimulus-categories were matched on various factors, including body postures, proportion, and expressed dynamism. The stimuli were presented in two conditions: observation and esthetic judgment. The two stimuluscategories produced a rather similar global activation pattern. Direct comparisons between sculpture and real-body images revealed, however, relevant differences, among which the activation of right antero-dorsal insula during sculptures viewing only. Along with our previous data, this finding suggests that the hedonic state associated with activation of right dorsal anterior insula underpins esthetic experience for artworks.

Progress in Brain Research, 2018

It has recently been suggested that research in neuroscience of art has failed to bring art into focus in the laboratory. Two general arguments are brought to bear in the regard. The common perceptual mechanisms argument observes that neuroscientists working within this field develop models to explain art relative to the ways that artworks are fine-tuned to the operations of perceptual systems. However, these perceptual explanations apply equally to how viewers come to recognize and understand art and nonart objects and events. Therefore these explanations fail to disambiguate artworks from other things. They fail to locate art. This observation points to a deeper problem. What interests us in art is how what we perceive has been used to show us what the work represents. Our understanding of art is governed by a range of productive and evaluative normative conventions that govern how we ought to look at a work and evaluate how it was made. The normative dimension of appreciation argument suggests that these aspects of our engagement with artworks lie outside the scope of neuroscientific explanations of art. This chapter provides a sketch of a diagnostic recognition framework for engaging art that resolves both problems and helps explains how artworks function within the social institution of the artworld to facilitate a communicative exchange between artists and consumers.

2018

Numerous studies in psychological and aesthetic research used artworks as stimuli. Until now, it was assumed by the researchers but never confirmed whether the stimuli would be classified as art by the participants or not. This methodical gap raises questions about the reliability of the results of such studies. Classification of stimuli as art may employ different strategies which lead to different assumptions about art. In Study 1, behavioral measurements to examine the nature of arthood classification across a range of art types were taken. We found that stimuli of no art type were classified by all participants as art or not and interpersonal differences interact with the classification as art. Study 1 also served to provide a pretested set of stimuli for further investigation of art classification processes. In Study 2, we investigated the specific neurological question of classification by applying transcranial direct current stimulation. We found a close to statistically sign...