Naturalizing aesthetics: Brain areas for aesthetic appraisal across sensory modalities

By Steven Brown, Xiaoqing Gao, Loren Tisdelle, Simon B. Eickhoff, Mario Liotti. NeuroImage, 2011

337 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present here the most comprehensive analysis to date of neuroaesthetic processing by reporting the results of voxel-based meta-analyses of 93 neuroimaging studies of positive-valence aesthetic appraisal across four sensory modalities. The results demonstrate that the most concordant area of activation across all four modalities is the right anterior insula, an area typically associated with visceral perception, especially of negative valence (disgust, pain, etc.). We argue that aesthetic processing is, at its core, the appraisal of the valence of perceived objects. This appraisal is in no way limited to artworks but is instead applicable to all types of perceived objects. Therefore, one way to naturalize aesthetics is to argue that such a system evolved first for the appraisal of objects of survival advantage, such as food sources, and was later co-opted in humans for the experience of artworks for the satisfaction of social needs.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9467b6b9fa9937620a032fc1ef09286203c948a

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Citations in the corpus

Just how much of what we taste derives from the sense of smell? (2015, background): “(12)And this is before we get to the complexity that is introduced by the fact that we use the word taste to talk about aesthetic appreciation here [92].”
Image Aesthetic Assessment: An experimental survey (2016, background): “human aesthetic experience and the sensation caused by visual stimuli regardless of source, culture, and experience [6], which is supported by activations in speciﬁc regions of the visual cortex [7], [8], [9], [10]. For example, human’s general reward circuitry produces pleasure when people look at ”