Visual attention bias for self-made 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.

In a task of rating images of artworks in an fMRI scanner, regions in the medial prefrontal cortex that are known to be part of the default mode network (DMN) were positively activated on the highest-rated trials. This is surprising given the DMN's original characterization as the set of brain regions that show greater fMRI activity during rest periods than during performance of tasks requiring focus on external stimuli. But further research showed that DMN regions could be positively activated also in structured tasks, if those tasks involved self-referential thought or self-relevant information. How may our findings be understood in this context? Although our task had no explicit self-referential aspect and the stimuli had no a priori self-relevance to the observers, the experimental design we employed emphasized the personal aspects of aesthetic experience. Observers were told that we were interested in their individual tastes, and asked to base their ratings on how much each artwork "moved" them. Moreover, we used little-known artworks that covered a wide range of styles, which led to high individual variability: each artwork was rated highly by some observers and poorly by others. This means that rating-specific neural responses cannot be attributed to the features of any particular artworks, but rather to the aesthetic experience itself. The DMN activity therefore suggests that certain artworks, albeit unfamiliar, may be so well-matched to an individual's unique makeup that they obtain access to the neural substrates concerned with the self-access which other external stimuli normally do not get. This mediates a sense of being "moved," or "touched from within." This account is consistent with the modern notion that individuals' taste in art is linked with their sense of identity, and suggests that DMN activity may serve to signal "self-relevance" in a broader sense than has been thought so far. Frontiers in Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org December 2013 | Volume 7 | Article 258 | 1 Vessel et al. Art reaches within KEY CONCEPT 1 | Neuroaesthetics A multi-disciplinary field aimed at understanding the neural basis of aesthetic experience and behavior. This includes interactions with art-objects as well as aesthetic modes of interaction with non-art objects, such as faces, natural objects, and scenes. Citation: Vessel EA, Starr GG and Rubin N (2013) Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network. Front. Neurosci. 7:258.

2014

There is a standard skeptical concern within philosophy of art that causal explanations in psychology and neuroscience apply equally to our engagement with art that is done well and art that is done poorly and so do not contribute to our understanding of the normative dimension of artistic appreciation. This skeptical concern is often used to challenge the relevance of psychology and neuroscience to our understanding of art. I sketch a crossmodal model for perception which demonstrates that those affective processes responsible for encoding the biological and instrumental value of a stimulus play a critical productive role in perceptual processing. I argue that the ensuing model for affective perception dissolves these skeptical philosophical concerns.

Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics

What are the psychological processes that drive the evaluation and appreciation of art? To date, the psychological study of art has largely focused on the perceptual aspects of viewing artwork-i.e., how certain colors, shapes, axes of symmetry, etc. give rise to perceptions of beauty and good form. More recently, however, a number of researchers have begun to examine

Spatial Vision, 2008

Two experiments were performed during which adults untrained in the visual arts were shown digital versions of eight paintings by renowned artists. In Experiment 1 participants' written reactions following a single 100 ms glance at each work were found to overwhelmingly reflect an initial holistic impression (i.e. gist) of the structural arrangement and semantic meaning of the paintings. In the second experiment participants' eye movements and verbal reactions were recorded as they evaluated each reproduction for pleasingness. Analyses reveal the relationships between the content and structural organization of the art stimuli and the way viewers select, process and think about information contained in paintings across the time course of an aesthetic experience. The results are interpreted in terms of an information-processing stage model of visual aesthetics according to which perceptual-cognitive processing of an art stimulus begins with the rapid generation of a gist reaction followed by scrutiny of pictorial features directed in a top-down fashion by cognitively-based evaluative processes.

To date, individual differences in the neuroaesthetics of mundane art are seldom studied. This study addresses group differences with regard to the neural mechanisms of aesthetic emotions and aesthetic judgments toward everyday designed products according to levels of everyday aesthetic experience and expertise in design. A fMRI experiment that included 26 college students was employed. The findings of this study suggest that rich everyday aesthetic experience elicits more brain activations in aesthetic judgments, and expertise in design elicits more brain activations in aesthetic emotions. Comparatively, rich everyday experience and expertise modulate the integration of external sensation and internal states, top-down attention, reward processing, and emotion regulation when viewing beautiful stimuli, whereas poor everyday experience and expertise modulate conscious assessment of self-relevant meaning as well as retrieval of negative memory and emotions when viewing ugly stimuli. These findings provide insights for enhancing aesthetic ability through daily life experience and instruction.

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.

Art preferences are affected by a number of subjective factors. This paper reports two studies which investigated whether need for closure shapes implicit art preferences. It was predicted that higher need for closure would negatively affect implicit preferences for abstract art. In study one, 60 participants were tested for dispositional need for closure and then completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) task to measure their implicit preference for abstract (vs. figurative) paintings. In study two, 54 participants completed the same IAT task. In this experiment need for closure was both manipulated by cognitive load and tapped as a dispositional trait. Results of the studies converged in showing that after controlling for other important individual factors such as participants’expertise and cognitive ability, need for closure, both as a dispositional trait and as a situationally induced motivational state, was negatively associated with implicit preference for abstract art.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2019

Earlier work has demonstrated that attention is indirectly cognitively malleable by processes of self-associationprocesses by which agents explicitly associate an item with the self. We extend this work by considering the manipulation of attention to both salient and non-salient objects. We demonstrate that self-association impacts attentional processing not only of non-salient objects (i.e., shapes), but also regarding salient items known to command attention (i.e., images of food). This result indicates the flexibility and susceptibility of attentional processing to cognitive manipulation.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2022

For centuries, Western philosophers have argued that aesthetic experiences differ from common, everyday pleasing sensations, and further, that mental states, such as disinterested contemplation and aesthetic distance, underlie these complex experiences. We empirically tested whether basic perceptual processes of information intake reveal evidence for aesthetic distance, specifically toward visual art. We conducted two eye tracking experiments using appropriately matched visual stimuli (environmental scenes and representational paintings) with 59 participants using two different presentation durations (25 and 6 s). Linear mixed-effects models considering individual differences showed that affective content (pleasantness and arousal), but not stimulus composition (complexity), leads to differential effects when viewing representational paintings in comparison to environmental scenes. We demonstrate that an increase in aesthetic pleasantness induced by representational paintings during a free-viewing task leads to a slower and deeper processing mode than when viewing environmental scenes of motivational relevance, for which we observed the opposite effect. In addition, long presentation durations led to an increase in scanning behavior during visual art perception. These empirical findings inform the debate about how aesthetic experiences differ from everyday perceptual processes by showing that the notion of aesthetic distance may be better understood by examining different modes of viewing.