scholarly journals The neural mechanism of aesthetic judgments of dynamic landscapes: an fMRI study

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xueru Zhao ◽  
Junjing Wang ◽  
Jinhui Li ◽  
Guang Luo ◽  
Ting Li ◽  
...  

AbstractMost previous neuroaesthetics research has been limited to considering the aesthetic judgment of static stimuli, with few studies examining the aesthetic judgment of dynamic stimuli. The present study explored the neural mechanisms underlying aesthetic judgment of dynamic landscapes, and compared the neural mechanisms between the aesthetic judgments of dynamic landscapes and static ones. Participants were scanned while they performed aesthetic judgments on dynamic landscapes and matched static ones. The results revealed regions of occipital lobe, frontal lobe, supplementary motor area, cingulate cortex and insula were commonly activated both in the aesthetic judgments of dynamic and static landscapes. Furthermore, compared to static landscapes, stronger activations of middle temporal gyrus (MT/V5), and hippocampus were found in the aesthetic judgments of dynamic landscapes. This study provided neural evidence that visual processing related regions, emotion-related regions were more active when viewing dynamic landscapes than static ones, which also indicated that dynamic stimuli were more beautiful than static ones.

1966 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene L. Hartley ◽  
Shirley Schwartz

An empirical test was made of the relation of self-consistency to strength of the aesthetic value in determining aesthetic judgments. 25 undergraduate Ss responded to 24 paintings. From each respondent was collected: (1) using a self-anchoring scale adaptation, a self-rating of personality characteristics subjectively deemed the significant attributes characterizing those who liked and disliked each painting as the self-concept index, (2) rating of the degree of liking each painting on a six-point scale as the aesthetic behavior studied and (3) score on the Aesthetic Value of the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values as the index of the strength or importance of the particular value involved. Tetrachoric correlations of the 24 sets of responses made by each individual in (1) and (2) were used as the indices of self-consistency. The mean rt = .50 ( p < .01). Rank difference correlations of these rts and the score on the Aesthetic Value from (3) indicated the importance of the value in determining the strength of the self-consistency ( rho = .39, p < 05), confirming the significance of this correlate of the self-consistency dynamic in aesthetic judgment.


The article examines the essence and relationship of aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment. It is argued that philosophical aesthetics deals with constants that are fundamental to aesthetic experience. Such constants are phenomena and characteristics that have a fundamental ontological status in the aesthetic sphere. It was found that the ontological characteristic of aesthetic experience is that it is not reducible to “pure” rationality, that is, it is not something that is “adapted” to complete and final comprehension by the mind alone. Therefore, a complete “absorption” of aesthetic experience by a certain semantic structure is impossible: such experience always goes beyond any discursive boundaries and simultaneously opens them. In addition, aesthetic experience serves as one of the means of a person’s “contact” with the world and society. Forming on the material of sensations, aesthetic experience extends from the most general ideas about the universe to the inner life of a person. The analysis also showed that the formulation of an aesthetic judgment is based on the concepts of the perfect and the imperfect. In turn, the mastery of such concepts is carried out in the process of correlating a certain aesthetic fact with the existing value scale. That is why aesthetic judgments have signs of normativity. They also create the basis for a common worldview and attitude, lay the foundation for mutual understanding between people of a certain culture. The study showed that the process of aesthetic assessment is a constant correlation of the existing state of affairs with something ideal (within a certain value scale), this is a permanent “demand” for perfection, as well as a tireless search for an opportunity to fulfill this “demand”. At the same time, ethical experience is dissociated from “pure” pragmatics, which personifies vital necessity, because the aesthetic sphere is always associated with a certain “redundancy” in human existence. Also, the results obtained in the course of the study suggested that philosophical aesthetics, which takes into account and investigates the specificity of the phenomenon of corporeality, as well as such phenomena of human existence as affective sensitivity and sensitive rationality, is able to overcome the limitation of “an-esthetic” naturalism in aesthetics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (54) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Kyndrup

The article argues that although all scholars within aesthetics basically know and recognize it, there is a tendency in many of its traditions to forget or to underestimate the importance of the aesthetic judgment. With Thierry de Duve’s short paper “Why Kant got it Right” as its point of departure, this importance is discussed. Not only its importance in aesthetic relations and to aesthetics as a discipline, but also in a broader sense, through the contribution to the overall social cohesion of society, offered by aesthetic judgments. All judgments are pronounced as-if a shared scale of aesthetic preferences did exist (which it does not). Judgments are addressed to communities, to the notion of a joint “we”, and thus they do participate in the creation and the maintenance of the social as such. Also professional aesthetic critique, including art critique, should be aware of that, since even historically achieved differentiations and divisions of labour may be lost again if not being developed and kept up to date.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingcheng He ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Hira Shahid ◽  
Yushan Liu ◽  
Xiaoling Liang ◽  
...  

Previous behavioral studies on aesthetics demonstrated that there was a close association between perceived action and aesthetic appreciation. However, few studies explored whether motor imagery would influence aesthetic experience and its neural substrates. In the current study, Chinese calligraphy was used as the stimuli to explore the relationship between the motor imagery and the aesthetic judgments of a participant using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The imaging results showed that, compared with the baseline, the activation of the brain regions [e.g., anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), putamen, and insula] involved in perceptual processing, cognitive judgments, aesthetic emotional, and reward processing was observed after the participants performed motor imagery tasks. The contrast analyses within aesthetic judgments showed that the kinesthetic imagery significantly activated the middle frontal gyrus, postcentral gyrus, ACC, and thalamus. Generally, these areas were considered to be closely related to positive aesthetic experience and suggested that motor imagery, especially kinesthetic imagery, might be specifically associated with the aesthetic appreciation of Chinese calligraphy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 141-220
Author(s):  
Michael A. Arbib

Le Corbusier’s distinction between engineering and architectural aesthetics introduces the challenges of balancing the practical and the aesthetic, and introduces his dictum, “A house is a machine for living in.” Here, beauty is just one aspect of the emotional impact of a building. Early visual processing in the frog is action-oriented, while in the primate it is general-purpose. These support different approaches to aesthetic judgment of visual form and suggest deep evolutionary underpinnings of aesthetic judgment. Neuroscientists distinguish working memory, episodic memory, procedural memory, and semantic memory. The VISIONS model exemplifies some of these, as well as principles of brain operation, including competition and cooperation of schema instances in constructing an interpretation of a visual scene. What people attend to is influenced by task and motivation. After assessing how a blind artist developed the ability to paint pictures, the chapter outlines MULTIMODES, a cognitive model that extends the principles of VISIONS to multimodal action-oriented perception of episodes.


1971 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 817-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. J. Eysenck ◽  
Saburo Iwawaki

179 British students rated the aesthetic appeal of 131 designs and 135 polygons on a 5-point scale. Similar judgments were made by 115 Japanese students who did not, however, rate both designs and polygons but rather one or the other set. Correlations between mean ratings for the designs and polygons were uniformly positive and high, suggesting the comparative absence of cultural factors determining aesthetic judgments in this field. The data were interpreted as favouring Eysenck's theory of a general factor of aesthetic judgment in the visual field.


2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 2137-2152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly A. Snyder ◽  
Andreas Keil

Habituation refers to a decline in orienting or responding to a repeated stimulus, and can be inferred to reflect learning about the properties of the repeated stimulus when followed by increased orienting to a novel stimulus (i.e., novelty detection). Habituation and novelty detection paradigms have been used for over 40 years to study perceptual and mnemonic processes in the human infant, yet important questions remain about the nature of these processes in infants. The aim of the present study was to examine the neural mechanisms underlying habituation and novelty detection in infants. Specifically, we investigated changes in induced alpha, beta, and gamma activity in 6-month-old infants during repeated presentations of either a face or an object, and examined whether these changes predicted behavioral responses to novelty at test. We found that induced gamma activity over occipital scalp regions decreased with stimulus repetition in the face condition but not in the toy condition, and that greater decreases in the gamma band were associated with enhanced orienting to a novel face at test. The pattern and topography of these findings are consistent with observations of repetition suppression in the occipital–temporal visual processing pathway, and suggest that encoding in infant habituation paradigms may reflect a form of perceptual learning. Implications for the role of repetition suppression in infant habituation and novelty detection are discussed with respect to a biased competition model of visual attention.


1989 ◽  
Vol 155 (S7) ◽  
pp. 93-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy C. Andreasen

When Kraepelin originally defined and described dementia praecox, he assumed that it was due to some type of neural mechanism. He hypothesised that abnormalities could occur in a variety of brain regions, including the prefrontal, auditory, and language regions of the cortex. Many members of his department, including Alzheimer and Nissl, were actively involved in the search for the neuropathological lesions that would characterise schizophrenia. Although Kraepelin did not use the term ‘negative symptoms', he describes them comprehensively and states explicitly that he believes the symptoms of schizophrenia can be explained in terms of brain dysfunction:“If it should be confirmed that the disease attacks by preference the frontal areas of the brain, the central convolutions and central lobes, this distribution would in a certain measure agree with our present views about the site of the psychic mechanisms which are principally injured by the disease. On various grounds, it is easy to believe that the frontal cortex, which is specially well developed in man, stands in closer relation to his higher intellectual abilities, and these are the faculties which in our patients invariably suffer profound loss in contrast to memory and acquired ability.” Kraepelin (1919, p. 219)


Author(s):  
Mohammad S.E Sendi ◽  
Godfrey D Pearlson ◽  
Daniel H Mathalon ◽  
Judith M Ford ◽  
Adrian Preda ◽  
...  

Although visual processing impairments have been explored in schizophrenia (SZ), their underlying neurobiology of the visual processing impairments has not been widely studied. Also, while some research has hinted at differences in information transfer and flow in SZ, there are few investigations of the dynamics of functional connectivity within visual networks. In this study, we analyzed resting-state fMRI data of the visual sensory network (VSN) in 160 healthy control (HC) subjects and 151 SZ subjects. We estimated 9 independent components within the VSN. Then, we calculated the dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) using the Pearson correlation. Next, using k-means clustering, we partitioned the dFNCs into five distinct states, and then we calculated the portion of time each subject spent in each state, that we termed the occupancy rate (OCR). Using OCR, we compared HC with SZ subjects and investigated the link between OCR and visual learning in SZ subjects. Besides, we compared the VSN functional connectivity of SZ and HC subjects in each state. We found that this network is indeed highly dynamic. Each state represents a unique connectivity pattern of fluctuations in VSN FNC, and all states showed significant disruption in SZ. Overall, HC showed stronger connectivity within the VSN in states. SZ subjects spent more time in a state in which the connectivity between the middle temporal gyrus and other regions of VNS is highly negative. Besides, OCR in a state with strong positive connectivity between middle temporal gyrus and other regions correlated significantly with visual learning scores in SZ.


Cortex ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christianne Jacobs ◽  
Tom A. de Graaf ◽  
Alexander T. Sack

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