18.1. INTRODUCTION

A person stands transfixed before a Mark Rothko abstract painting oblivious to everything else. Embedded in this scene are questions that strike at the very heart of this book. What is the sensation being experienced? If the color or form of the painting were altered slightly, would the experience be the same? Why do some visitors to the museum glance at the same painting and shrug their shoulders before being absorbed by a Cezanne landscape or a Rembrandt portrait? Why do visitors bother to gaze at paintings at all? What is the nature of the reward that compels them to travel distances, pay entrance fees, and negotiate crowds to stare at pieces of canvas? What, if anything, distinguishes this rewarding experience from the pleasure of gazing at an attractive person or from the anticipation of a good meal?

In this chapter, I explore these issues in aesthetics through the lens of cognitive neuroscience. The term aesthetics is used broadly here, to encompass the perception, production, and response to art, but also to include the responses to objects and scenes that evoke a response that could be considered aesthetic. The nature of this response is something to which I shall return later in this chapter. I start by reviewing recent comments on the relationship of art and the brain made by visual neuroscientists. I then describe a framework that might guide research in neuroaesthetics. Following that, I review empirical work conducted thus far. Finally, I suggest how progress could be made in this nascent field.

At the outset, I should be clear about limits to defining art (Carroll 2000). Some philosophers have claimed that defining art with necessary and sufficient conditions is not possible (Weitz 1956). In response to such claims, recent theoreticians have defined art by its social and institutional (Dickie 1969) or its historical context (Danto 1964). Cognitive neuroscientists are unlikely to address sociological or historical conceptions of art. They are likely to sidestep definitional issues and focus on accepted examples of artwork or properties of these works as probes for experiments.

18.3. OBSERVATIONS ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF ART AND THE BRAIN

With rare exceptions, it is not clear that neuroscientists consider aesthetics worthy of inquiry. And some aestheticians probably consider neuroscientific inquiry into aesthetics an abomination. Only recently has neuroscience joined a tradition of empirical aesthetics that dates back to Fechner in the nineteenth century (Fechner 1876; and see Chapter 2 in this volume for more information about Fechner). The first wave of writings on aesthetics by neuroscientists points to parallels between art and organizational principles of the brain.

Zeki (1999) argued forcefully that no theory of aesthetics is complete without an understanding of its neural underpinnings. He suggested that the goals of the nervous system and of artists are similar. Both are driven to understand essential attributes of the world. The nervous system decomposes visual information into different components, such as color, luminance, and motion. Similarly, many artists, particularly within the last century, isolated different visual attributes. For example, Matisse emphasized color and Calder emphasized motion. Zeki suggests that artists, like visual neuroscientists, endeavor to uncover important distinctions in the visual world. In doing so, they discover modules of the visual brain. Recently, Cavanagh (2005) has similarly claimed that the artists’ goals resemble those of the nervous system. He observes that paintings often violate the physics of shadows, reflections, colors, and contours. Rather than adhering to physical properties of the world, these paintings reflect perceptual shortcuts used by the brain. Artists, in experimenting with forms of depiction, discovered what psychologists and neuroscientists are now identifying as principles of perception.

Livingstone (2002) and Conway (Conway and Livingstone 2007) focused on how artists make use of complex interactions between different components of vision in creating their paintings. The dorsal (where) and ventral (what) processing distinction is a central tenet in visual neuroscience (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982) (though see Chapter 8 in this volume). The dorsal stream is sensitive to contrast differences, motion, and spatial location. The ventral stream is sensitive to simple form and color. Livingstone suggests that the shimmering quality of water or the sun’s glow on the horizon seen in some impressionist paintings (e.g., the sun and surrounding clouds in Monet’s Impression Sunrise) is produced by isoluminant objects distinguishable only by color. The dorsal stream is insensitive to these elements of the image. Since the dorsal stream identifies motion (or the lack thereof) and spatial location, Livingstone argues that isoluminant forms are not fixed with respect to motion or spatial location and are experienced as unstable or shimmering. Conversely, since shape can be derived from luminance differences, she argues that artists use contrast to produce shapes, leaving color for expressive rather than descriptive purposes (as in Derain’s portrait of Matisse). Livingstone highlights the combinatorial properties of visual attributes. Artists use these combinatorial properties to produce specific aesthetic effects.

Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) proposed a set of perceptual principles underlying aesthetic experiences. For example, they emphasize the “peak shift” phenomena as offering insight into the aesthetics of abstract art by relying on Tinbergen’s (1954) work. Tinbergen demonstrated that seagull chicks beg for food from their mothers by pecking on a red spot near the tip of the mother’s beak. It turns out that a disembodied long thin stick with three red stripes near the end evokes an exaggerated response from these chicks. Ramachandran and Hirstein propose that neural structures that evolved to respond to specific visual stimuli respond more vigorously (a shift in their peak response) to underlying primitives of that form even when the viewer is not aware of the primitive. Their insight is that abstract art may be tapping into such visual primitives.

These examples of recent comments reflect an emerging recognition by neuroscientists that visual aesthetics are an important part of human experience, which ought to conform to principles of neural organization. Intriguing parallels exist between the concerns and techniques of artists and the organization of the visual brain. Some components of visual aesthetics should be amenable to empirical methods from cognitive neuroscience. The challenge ahead is to transform these comments into testable hypotheses and experimental paradigms.

18.3. A FRAMEWORK FOR NEUROAESTHETICS RESEARCH

A cognitive neuroscience research program in visual aesthetics rests on two principles (Chatterjee 2002). First, visual aesthetics, like vision in general, has multiple components. Second, an aesthetic experience emerges from a combination of responses to different components of a visual object. The process by which humans visually recognize objects offers a framework from which to consider these components. Investigations can be focused on these components and on their combinatorial properties.

The nervous system processes visual information both hierarchically and in parallel (Van Essen et al. 1990; Zeki 1993; Farah 2000). The levels of this processing can be classified as early, intermediate, and late vision (Marr 1982). Early vision extracts simple elements from the visual environment, such as color, luminance, shape, motion, and location (Livingstone and Hubel 1987; Livingstone 1988). These elements are processed in different parts of the brain. Intermediate vision segregates some elements and groups others together to form coherent regions in what would otherwise be a chaotic and overwhelming sensory array (Biederman and Cooper 1991; Grossberg, Mingolla, and Ros 1997; Vecera and Behrmann 1997; Ricci, Vaishnavi, and Chatterjee 1999). Late vision selects which of these coherent regions to scrutinize and evokes memories from which objects are recognized and meanings attached (Chatterjee 2003a; Farah 2000).

This sequence of visual processing is likely to be reflected in aesthetics (Chatterjee 2003b) (for a related model, see Helmut et al. 2004). Any work of art can be decomposed into its early, intermediate, and late vision components, and individual works of visual art (paintings) can be identified that exemplify each of these different componential stages (Figure 18.1). Aesthetic writings commonly distinguish between form and content (e.g., Russell and George 1990; Woods 1991). Similarly, scientists observe that early and intermediate vision process form and later vision processes content. Figure 18.2 shows a model of how the neuroscience of visual aesthetics might be mapped. The early features of an art object might be its color and its spatial location. These elements would be grouped together to form larger units in intermediate vision. Such grouping occurs automatically. The neural basis of grouping is not well understood, but it likely involves extrastriate cortex (Biederman and Cooper 1991; Grossberg, Mingolla, and Ros 1997). Grouping creates “unity in diversity,” a central notion of compositional balance.

FIGURE 18.1

(See Color Insert)Visual aesthetics recapitulates visual processing: a hierarchical progression as documented through the brushstrokes of three renowned artists. Each painting depicts the female figure, through successive levels of representational complexity, (more...)

FIGURE 18.2

A general information-processing model to guide research in neuroaesthetics. See text for details.

If compositional form is apprehended automatically by intermediate vision, then sensitivity to such form should also be automatic. Subjects are sensitive to compositional form “at a glance,” with exposures as short as 50 msec (Locher and Nagy 1996). Intriguingly, preference for form predominates when images are shown over short exposure times, while preference for detail predominates when images are shown for slightly longer times (Ognjenovic 1991). Combinations of early and intermediate visual properties (e.g., color, shape, composition) engage attentional circuits mediated by frontal-parietal neural networks. Attentional modulation of early vision (Motter 1993, 1994; Shulman et al. 1997; Watanabe et al. 1998) is likely to contribute to a more vivid experience of the stimulus.

Beyond perception in visual aesthetics, two other aspects of aesthetics are important. The first is the emotional response to an aesthetic image; the second is how aesthetic judgments are made. The anterior medial temporal lobe, medial and orbitofrontal cortices, and subcortical structures mediate emotions in general, and reward systems in particular (Schultz, Dayans, and Mortague 1997; O’Doherty et al. 2001; Elliott, Friston, and Dolan 2000; Delgado et al. 2000; Breiter et al. 2001; Berridge and Kringelbach 2008). Aesthetic judgments about stimuli, as measured by preference ratings or appraisals, are likely to engage widely distributed circuits, most importantly the dorsolateral frontal and medial frontal cortices.

18.4. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE: LESION STUDIES

Investigations of patients with brain damage have contributed greatly to our understanding of cognitive and affective systems. This approach also has substantial promise in advancing neuroaesthetics. Diseases of the brain can impair our ability to speak or comprehend language, to coordinate movements, to recognize objects, to apprehend emotions, and to make logical decisions. By contrast, while damage to the brain can certainly impair the ability to produce art, paradoxically, in some cases art abilities seem to improve. Brain damage can create a disposition to produce visual art, provide artists with a unique visual vocabulary, add to artists’ descriptive accuracy, and enhance their expressive powers. These paradoxical improvements offer unique insights into the creative underpinnings of artistic output. They are reviewed elsewhere (Chatterjee 2004, 2006, 2009) and will not be discussed further in this chapter, in keeping with the present focus on sensation and reward.

Studies of people with brain damage also can advance our understanding of the perception and experience of art. Some people with brain damage probably do not perceive art in the same way that non-brain-damaged individuals do and their emotional responses to artwork may very well differ from those of people without brain damage (cf. Chapter 16). However, neuropsychological investigations of aesthetic perception to date are non-existent. There is no adequate instrument to provide basic quantitative assessments of a person’s apprehension artwork. We are currently developing such a tool, The Assessment of Art Attributes (Chatterjee et al. 2010). This assessment assumes that the perception of art can be organized along different perceptual and conceptual attributes (see Table 18.1). Using such an assessment, one could begin to investigate groups of patients and ascertain the relationship of brain damage to selective deficits or enhancements in art perception. Much remains to be learned if we can develop adequate methods and measurements for this line of inquiry.

TABLE 18.1

A Pervasive Concern in Empirical Aesthetics has been Distinguishing between Form and Content of Artwork.

18.5. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE: IMAGING STUDIES OF BEAUTY

Beauty is integral to most people’s concept of aesthetics (Jacobsen et al. 2004). Of course, not all art is beautiful and artists do not always intend to produce beautiful things. But beauty remains a central concept in discussions of art. Understanding the neural basis of the apprehension of and response to beauty might give us insight into the apprehension of and response to visual art. Facial beauty has received particular attention.

The response to facial beauty is likely to be deeply encoded in our biology. Cross-cultural judgments of facial beauty are quite consistent (Etcoff 1999; Perrett, May, and Yoshikawa 1994; Jones and Hill 1993). Adults and children within and across cultures agree in their judgments of facial attractiveness (Langlois et al. 2000), suggesting that universal principles of facial beauty exist. Similarly, infants look longer at attractive faces within a week of being born and the effects of facial attractiveness on infants’ gaze generalize across race, gender, and age by 6 months (Langlois et al. 1991; Slater et al. 1998). Thus, the disposition to engage attractive faces is present in brains that have not been modified greatly by experience. Some components of beauty are shaped further by cultural factors (Cunningham et al. 2002), but the universal components are likely to have distinct neural underpinnings.

Several studies report that attractive faces activate neural circuitry involved in reward systems, including the orbitofrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral striatum (Kampe et al. 2001; Aharon et al. 2001; O’Doherty et al. 2003; Ishai 2007; Kranz and Ishai 2006), and the amygdala (Winston et al. 2007). These regional activations are interpreted as reflecting emotional valences attached to attractive faces (Senior 2003). The particular emotional valences are those involved in the expectation of rewards and the satisfaction of appetites. The idea that attractive faces are rewarding stimuli, at least for men, is evident behaviorally. Heterosexual men discount higher future rewards for smaller immediate rewards with attractive female faces (Wilson and Daly 2004). Presumably these patterns of neural activation reflect ways in which attractive faces influence mate selection (Ishai 2007).

Perceptual features of faces, such as averageness, symmetry, the structure of cheek bones, the relative size of the lower half of the face, and the width of the jaw, influence people’s judgments of facial beauty (Grammer and Thornhill 1994; Enquist and Arak 1994; Penton-Voak et al. 2001). Winston et al. (2007) found left posterior occipito-temporal activity was enhanced by facial attractiveness. Similarly, Kranz and Ishai (2006) found greater activations in the lateral fusiform gyrus for attractive female faces than for unattractive female faces.

We conducted a study in which participants judged the attractiveness or matched the identity of pairs of faces. Attractiveness judgments evoked neural activity within a distributed network involving ventral visual association cortices and parts of dorsal posterior parietal and prefrontal cortices (Chatterjee et al. 2009). We interpreted the parietal, medial, and dorsolateral frontal activations as representing the neural correlates of the attention and decision-making components of this task. We also found positively correlated activity within the insula and negatively correlated activations within the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. We inferred that these patterns represent the emotional responses to attractiveness. Importantly, when subjects matched the identity of faces, attractiveness continued to evoke neural responses in ventral visual areas, with a strength indistinguishable from that when participants considered beauty explicitly, suggesting that this ventral occipital region responds to beauty automatically.

Facial attractiveness is apprehended automatically (Palermo and Rhodes 2007; Olson and Marshuetz 2005) and has pervasive social effects beyond its specific role in mate selection. Attractive individuals are considered intelligent, honest, pleasant, and natural leaders (Kenealy, Frude, and Shaw 1988; Lerner et al. 1991; Ritts, Patterson, and Tubbs 1992), and are viewed as having socially desirable traits, such as strength and sensitivity (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster 1972). The cascade of neural events that bias social decisions is likely to be triggered by an early perceptual response to attractiveness. We proposed that neural activity within ventral visual cortices in response to facial attractiveness serves as the initial trigger for this cascade. The fact that this ventral occipital region of activation extended beyond cortical regions especially sensitive to faces per se raises the possibility that this area may be responsive to aesthetic objects more generally (Chatterjee et al. 2009).

18.6. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE: IMAGING STUDIES OF ART

Very few studies have used art to examine the neural bases of aesthetics. While the goals in these studies were similar, their experimental approaches differed and the results at first glance appear varied. Kawabata and Zeki (2004) asked participants to rate abstract, still life, landscape, or portraitures paintings as beautiful, neutral, or ugly. They used a fixed-effects analysis in a 3 × 4 factor event-related design with event types segregated as beautiful, neutral, or ugly in one of the four painting categories. Not surprisingly, they found that the pattern of activity within the ventral visual cortex varied depending on whether subjects were looking at portraits, landscapes, or still-lives. In orbitofrontal cortex (BA 11) they found greater activity for beautiful than for ugly or neutral stimuli. In the anterior cingulate (BA 32) and left parietal cortex (BA 39), they found greater activity for beautiful than for neutral stimuli. Only activity within the orbitofrontal cortex increased with the beauty of all the painting types and the authors interpreted this activity as representing the neural underpinnings of the aesthetic emotional experience.

Vartanian and Goel (2004) used images of representational and abstract paintings in an fMRI study. They found that activity within the occipital gyri bilaterally and the left anterior cingulate increased with preference ratings. They also found that activity within the right caudate decreased as preference ratings decreased. Representational paintings evoked more activity within the occipital poles, the precuneus, and the posterior middle temporal gyrus than did abstract paintings.

Cela-Conde et al. (2004) used magnetoencephalography to record event potentials when participants viewed images of artworks and photographs. Participants judged whether or not the images were beautiful. Beautiful images evoked greater neural activity than not-beautiful images over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with a latency of 400–1000 msec. The authors infer that this region is involved in making aesthetic judgments.

Jacobsen et al. (2005) used a different strategy to investigate the neural correlates of beauty in an fMRI study. Rather than use actual artworks as their stimuli, they used a set of geometric shapes designed in the laboratory. Participants judged whether the images were beautiful or whether the images were symmetric. Participants found symmetric patterns more beautiful than non-symmetric ones. Aesthetic judgments more than symmetry judgments activated the medial frontal cortex (BA 9/10), the precuneus, and the ventral prefrontal cortex (BA 44/47). The left intraparietal sulcus was conjointly active for symmetry and beauty judgments. Both beauty and complexity of the images evoked activity within orbitofrontal cortex. In a follow-up study using the same stimuli (Hofel and Jacobsen 2007), they found that beauty generated a lateral positive evoked potential in a temporal window between 360 and 1225 msec.

De Tommaso, Sardaro, and Livrea (2008) also used artworks that were rated as beautiful, neutral, and ugly. They found that gazing at beautiful paintings raised pain thresholds and at the same time inhibited P2 evoked potentials. The generators of the P2 potentials were localized to the anterior cingulate. These results suggest that aesthetic objects even in this laboratory setting are sufficiently engaging as to distract participants from unpleasant environmental stimuli.

One might be disheartened that these studies, all investigating aesthetics, report different patterns of activation. Nadal et al. (2008) suggest that the results of these studies are compatible within the general model (see Figure 18.2) that I proposed (Chatterjee 2003b). Engaging visual properties of paintings increase activity within ventral visual cortices (Vartanian and Goel 2004). Aesthetic judgments activate parts of dorsolateral prefrontal and medial prefrontal cortices (Cela-Conde et al. 2004; Jacobsen et al. 2005), and emotional responses to these stimuli activate the orbitofrontal (Kawabata and Zeki 2004; Jacobsen et al. 2005) as well as anterior cingulate (Kawabata and Zeki 2004; Vartanian and Goel 2004; de Tommaso, Sardaro, and Livrea 2008) cortices.

18.7. WHY ART?

Returning to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, why do people stand in hermetically sealed buildings that we call museums and stare at patches of paint on canvases? And why at some canvases, and not others? Any answer to these questions is necessarily speculative. I suggest that three factors are at play: the drive to beauty, the aesthetic attitude, and the institutional frameworks that promote and display art.

18.8. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

The neuroscience of visual aesthetics is in its infancy. With a field so wide open, progress in any direction would be an advance. Here, I suggest four areas worthy of focus. (1) A finer-grained exploration of the nature and contributions of sensations to aesthetic experiences. As already mentioned, visual art like any visual object can be decomposed into distinct attributes, such as color, line, texture, form, and so on. How do these attributes contribute to the aesthetic experience? How do we measure the contributions of these attributes? We have begun to develop a scale to do so for lesion studies (Chatterjee et al. 2010), but much work needs to be done.

How much of the aesthetic experience resides in a perceptual experience and how much resides in the emotional response to artwork? Paintings of landscapes are likely to activate the parahippocampus, still-lives the lateral occipital cortex, and portraits the fusiform gyrus. Does beauty modify these activations further? Perhaps these activations simply reflect category-specific activations evoked by perception itself, and the aesthetic work is done within reward systems. However, many feel that we perceive beautiful objects more vividly than non-beautiful objects. Some studies show neural responses to beauty within the ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Are these activations modulated by attention or is there an independent aesthetic factor that modulates neural activity? Moreover, within the ventral visual cortex, do general “visual beauty detectors” exist?

(2) Understanding the nature of aesthetic judgment. People vary in their aesthetic sensitivities. Aesthetic sensitivity has been referred to as a “T-factor” for taste (Eysenck 1941; Eysenck and Hawker 1994). People can also develop taste with training. Behavioral studies consistently show differences in the way that art-experienced individuals and art-naïve individuals look at artwork (Locher, Stappers, and Overbeeke 1999). Understanding the neural basis for taste and the ways aesthetic judgment might be modified with training would be of great interest.

The studies conducted thus far suggest that parts of the dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortex are involved in making aesthetic judgments. These studies are unable to distinguish whether these brain activations are specific to aesthetic judgments or are part of neural systems that makes judgments regardless of the domain under consideration. Do aesthetic judgments engage neural circuits that are not engaged in other judgments?

(3) Characterizing the “reward” of aesthetic experiences. The imaging studies reviewed here implicate the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior and posterior cingulate, the ventral striatum including the nucleus accumbens, the caudate, and the amygdala in one or another study as mediating the emotional response to beauty or to artwork. Presumably these structures differ in their functions (Berridge and Kringelbach 2008). Clearly a better sense of how these structures contribute to an overall emotional aesthetic experience is needed. Such an understanding would be necessary, for example, to address what is meant by “sublime,” an emotional experience mentioned frequently in aesthetics (Kant 1790/1987), but not in affective neuroscience.

(4) Constraining evolutionary theories. Evolutionary biology and psychology provide principles that help organize and interpret complex behavior. The universal nature of producing ornamentations and being pleased by these ornamentations certainly encourages evolutionary analyses of art. The challenge for evolutionary aestheticians is how to constrain this theorizing and test hypotheses. Evidence is gathered from disparate sources to argue for example whether art is adaptive (and in what way) or whether it is a by-product of adaptation. Comparative neuroscience has not contributed to the evolutionary discussions about art, but may provide some constraints on the theorizing. Even if such contributions from neuroscience were to be made, these hypotheses remain inherently post hoc (not unlike my speculations on “why art?”). The research enterprise lacks clear prospective tests of hypotheses and explicit conditions of falsifiability of experimental sciences.

In conclusion, aesthetics and a concern for beauty are central human experiences. They are integrally related to a specific set of sensations and rewards. While a small but dedicated group of investigators has been engaged in empirical aesthetics since the mid-nineteenth century, only recently has neuroscience wandered into this area. Some of the most basic questions about neuroaesthetics remain to be answered. The basic frameworks and methods from cognitive and affective neuroscience are in place for neuroaesthetics to mature as a science.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank Lisa Santer for a critical reading of an earlier draft of this chapter and Jay Gottfried for pushing me to speculate beyond my natural inclinations.

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