The Order & Complexity Toolbox for Aesthetics (OCTA): A systematic approach to study the relations between order, complexity, and aesthetic appreciation

Do individuals prefer stimuli that are ordered or chaotic, simple or complex, or that strike the right balance of order and complexity? Earlier research mainly focused on the separate influence of order and complexity on aesthetic appreciation. When order and complexity were studied in combination, stimulus manipulations were often not parametrically controlled, only rather specific types of order (i.e., balance or symmetry) were studied, and/or the multidimensionality of order and complexity was ignored. Progress has also been limited by the lack of an easy way to create reproducible and expandible stimulus sets, including both order and complexity manipulations. The Order & Complexity Toolbox for Aesthetics (OCTA), a Python toolbox that is also available as a point-and-click Shiny application, aims to fill this gap. OCTA provides researchers with a free and easy way to create multi-element displays varying qualitatively (i.e., different types) and quantitatively (i.e., different levels) in order and complexity, based on regularity and variety along multiple element features (e.g., shape, size, color, orientation). The standard vector-based output is ideal for experiments on the web and the creation of dynamic interfaces and stimuli. OCTA will not only facilitate reproducible stimulus construction and experimental design in research on order, complexity, and aesthetics. In addition, OCTA can be a very useful tool in any type of research using visual stimuli, or even to create digital art. To illustrate OCTA’s potential, we will propose several possible applications and diverse questions that can be addressed using OCTA.

‘When Hunger Makes Everything Better Looking!’: The Effect of Hunger on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Human Bodies, Faces and Objects

Background: Research evidence suggests that physiological state of hunger might affect preference for female body weight, such that hungrier, compared to satiate, men prefer heavier body weight and rate as more attractive heavier female figures. Here, we seek to extend these findings by comparing the effects of fasting and snack on aesthetics judgements of the bodies and faces of conspecifics and of objects in a sample of female and male participants. Methods: Forty-four participants (women: n = 21, mean age = 23.70yrs ± 0.62) provided aesthetic liking judgments of round and slim human bodies, faces and objects, under at least 12 h of overnight fasting and immediately after having eaten a snack (i.e., bananas). An anthropometric measure of adiposity (i.e., Body Mass Index, BMI) was also collected from each observer. Results: Overall, we found that participants’ aesthetic judgements were higher for slim stimuli compared to round ones. However, after fasting, participants rated round stimuli as more attractive compared to when they had a snack. This hunger-based shift in ratings not only was apparent when stimuli depicted a human body or face, but also when they depicted an object, thus suggesting a general modification of observers’ aesthetic preference related to hunger. Importantly, this effect was modulated by participants’ BMI so that only participants with a high BMI provided higher aesthetic judgements for round stimuli after fasting than after a snack. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that both the modification of the physiological state and the individual differences in adiposity level of the observers might affect the aesthetic appreciation of the external world.

Ancient Stone Inscription Image Denoising and Inpainting Methods Based on Deep Neural Networks

Chinese ancient stone inscriptions contain Chinese traditional calligraphy culture and art information. However, due to the long history of the ancient stone inscriptions, natural erosion, and poor early protection measures, there are a lot of noise in the existing ancient stone inscriptions, which has adverse effects on reading these stone inscriptions and their aesthetic appreciation. At present, digital technologies have played important roles in the protection of cultural relics. For ancient stone inscriptions, we should obtain more perfect digital results without multiple types of noise, while there are few deep learning methods designed for processing stone inscription images. Therefore, we propose a basic framework for image denoising and inpainting of stone inscriptions based on deep learning methods. Firstly, we collect as many images of stone inscriptions as possible and preprocess these images to establish an inscriptions image dataset for image denoising and inpainting. In addition, an improved GAN with a denoiser is used for generating more virtual stone inscription images to expand the dataset. On the basis of these collected and generated images, we designed a stone inscription image denoising model based on multiscale feature fusion and introduced Charbonnier loss function to improve this image denoising model. To further improve the denoising results, an image inpainting model with the coherent semantic attention mechanism is introduced to recover some effective information removed by the former denoising model as much as possible. The experimental results show that our image denoising model achieves better results on PSNR, SSIM, and CEI. The final results have obvious visual improvement compared with the original stone inscription images.

A Review of EEG and fMRI Measuring Aesthetic Processing in Visual User Experience Research

In human-computer interaction, the visual interaction of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) plays an important role in enriching the quality of daily life. The purpose of our study analyzes the use of brain-computer interface (BCI), wearable technology, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the aesthetic processing of visual neural response to UI and UX designs. Specifically, this review aims to understand neuroaesthetic processing knowledge, aesthetic appreciation models, and the ways in which visual brain studies can improve the quality of current and future UI and UX designs. Recent research has found that subjective evaluations of aesthetic appreciation produce different results for objective evaluations of brain research analysis. We applied SWOT analysis and examined the advantages and disadvantages of both evaluation methods. Furthermore, we conducted a traditional literature review on topics pertaining to the use of aesthetic processing knowledge in the visual interaction field in terms of art therapy, information visualization, website or mobile applications, and other interactive platforms. Our main research findings from current studies have helped and motivated researchers and designers to use convincing scientific knowledge of brain event-related potential, electroencephalography, and fMRI to understand aesthetic judgment. The key trend finds that many designers, artists, and engineers use artistic BCI technology in the visual interaction experience. Herein, the scientific methods applied in the aesthetic appreciation to human-computer interface are summarized, and the influence of the latest wearable brain technology on visual interaction design is discussed. Furthermore, current possible research entry points for aesthetics, usability, and creativity in UI and UX designs are explicated. The study results have implications for the visual user experience research domain as well as for interaction industries, which produce interactive projects to improve people’s daily lives.

How Neuroimaging Is Transforming Our Understanding of Aesthetic Taste

The concept of aesthetic appreciation is a historical construction with a history that traces back to the beginning of the 18th century. It proposes the idea that humans can experience a specific kind of nonutilitarian pleasure when exposed to a distinct set of aesthetic qualities. This chapter surveys findings from recent neuroimaging studies that have cast doubt on this idea. It explains how studies of neural activity associated with aesthetic appreciation have found “aesthetic” liking to engage similar neural structures as utilitarian liking, suggesting that aesthetic appreciation is rooted in computational principles that are common to hedonic evaluation broadly.

The Contribution of Visual Area V5 to the Perception of Implied Motion in Art and Its Appreciation

Does V5, a brain region involved in the perception of movement, contribute to the aesthetic appreciation of artworks that depict movement? In the study under discussion, the authors asked participants to view abstract and representational artworks depicting motion. While they judged the sense of motion conveyed by the artworks and how much they liked them, the authors delivered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over V5. They found that TMS over V5 reduced the sense of motion participants perceived and reduced how much participants liked the abstract paintings. These results show, first, that V5 is involved in extracting implied motion information even when the object whose motion is implied is not real. Second, they show that V5 is involved in extracting implied motion information even in the absence of any object, as in the abstract paintings. Finally, they show that activity in V5 plays a causal role in the appreciation of abstract art.

Bringing It All Together

The main goal of the article “The Neural Foundations of Aesthetic Appreciation” was to bring together the available evidence on the neural underpinnings of aesthetics from neuroimaging and neurology and offer an integral interpretative model. The authors relate how they wanted to explain how aesthetic appreciation was related to brain activity and why some studies had found that activity in some regions and other studies had found it in other regions. The authors proposed that there might be at least two stages of appreciation. The first stage is the formation of an initial impression. It involves perceptual processes interacting with attentional control signals and is mediated by a fronto-parieto-occipital network. The second stage is a deeper evaluation of the image and involves affective processes, searching for meaning, recalling personal experiences, and activating knowledge stored in memory.

Noninvasive Brain Stimulation of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex During Aesthetic Appreciation

Several neuroimaging studies had shown that activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) was associated with aesthetic appreciation. But, was this a causal association? In the article under discussion, the authors used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to determine whether lDLPFC activity actually caused increased aesthetic appreciation. Their results showed that tDCS over lDLPFC caused liking for artworks and photographs to increase. They therefore concluded that the lDLPFC plays a causal role in visual aesthetic appreciation. The authors suggested that lDLPFC activity contributes to disengaging from a pragmatic orientation to stimuli, consisting mainly in identifying objects, adopting an aesthetic orientation, and focusing on those objects’ aesthetic qualities.

An Eye for the Impossible

The embodied simulation account of aesthetics, proposed by Freedberg and Gallese, assigns a pivotal role to an observer’s body in aesthetic appreciation of an artwork. While originally focused on visual artworks (such as paintings and sculpture), this theory clearly also holds great relevance to the performing arts, in particular dance. In this chapter, the author describes how she was inspired by this theory, as well as earlier work using dance as stimuli and dancers as participants to explore the relationship between embodiment, perception, and brain activity from a non-artistic perspective, to examine how observers’ physical abilities (or lack thereof) shape dance preferences. The author describes her team’s work demonstrating that dance-naïve participants are most drawn to highly complex, impressive dance movements impossible for observers to embody or perform themselves and how engagement of brain regions implicated in translating perception into action appear to be involved in this process.