Lateral orbitofrontal cortex involvement in initial negative aesthetic impression formation.

It is well established that aesthetic appreciation is related with activity in several different brain regions. The identification of the neural correlates of beauty or liking ratings has been the focus of most prior studies. Not much attention has been directed towards the fact that humans are surrounded by objects that lead them to experience aesthetic indifference or leave them with a negative aesthetic impression. Here we explore the neural substrate of such experiences. Given the neuroimaging techniques that have been used, little is known about the temporal features of such brain activity. By means of magnetoencephalography we registered the moment at which brain activity differed while participants viewed images they considered to be beautiful or not. Results show that the first differential activity appears between 300 and 400 ms after stimulus onset. During this period activity in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) was greater while participants rated visual stimuli as not beautiful than when they rated them as beautiful. We argue that this activity is associated with an initial negative aesthetic impression formation, driven by the relative hedonic value of stimuli regarded as not beautiful. Additionally, our results contribute to the understanding of the nature of the functional roles of the lOFC.

Sex-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty.

The capacity to appreciate beauty is one of our species' most remarkable traits. Although knowledge about its neural correlates is growing, little is known about any gender-related differences. We have explored possible differences between men and women's neural correlates of aesthetic preference. We have used magnetoencephalography to record the brain activity of 10 male and 10 female participants while they decided whether or not they considered examples of artistic and natural visual stimuli to be beautiful. Our results reveal significantly different activity between the sexes in parietal regions when participants judged the stimuli as beautiful. Activity in this region was bilateral in women, whereas it was lateralized to the right hemisphere in men. It is known that the dorsal visual processing stream, which encompasses the superior parietal areas, has been significantly modified throughout human evolution. We posit that the observed gender-related differences are the result of evolutionary processes that occurred after the splitting of the human and chimpanzee lineages. In view of previous results on gender differences with respect to the neural correlates of coordinate and categorical spatial strategies, we infer that the different strategies used by men and women in assessing aesthetic preference may reflect differences in the strategies associated with the division of labor between our male and female hunter-gatherer hominin ancestors.

Familiaridad y evaluación de estímulos estéticos en función de la educación artística / Aesthetic judgment, familiarity and art education

Uno de los objetivos de la Psicología del Arte ha sido la identificación de medidas objetivas que puedan utilizarse para complementar los juicios estéticos verbales. En este estudio se explora la relación entre el reconocimiento y la evaluación estética de estímulos artísticos y decorativos por parte de participantes con educación artística y sin ella. Los participantes con educación artística tienden a otorgar puntuaciones mayores a los estímulos artísticos que los participantes sin esta educación en 4 escalas de valoración estética, tendencia que se invierte en los estímulos decorativos. Además, los participantes con educación se familiarizan mejor con los estímulos artísticos que los participantes sin educación, mientras que con los estímulos decorativos desaparece esta diferencia. Finalmente, los resultados respaldan, de manera general, la hipótesis de que los estímulos que han dejado una huella mnemónica mayor son los que reciben una mayor valoración estética

One of Psychology of Art’s aims is to identify objective measures that can be used to complement verbal aesthetic judgments. In this study we explored the relationship between the recognition and aesthetic evaluation of artistic and decorative stimuli by participants with and without art education. Participants with art education tend to score artistic stimuli higher than do participants without this education on 4 aesthetic assessment scales. This tendency reverses with decorative stimuli. Moreover, participants with education familiarize themselves better with artistic stimuli than do participants without education. This tendency disappears with decorative stimuli. Finally, overall results lend support to the hypothesis that stimuli that have left a strong mnemonic trace receive greater aesthetic value scores than stimuli that have not left a mnemonic trace

Activation of the prefrontal cortex in the human visual aesthetic perception.

Visual aesthetic perception ("aesthetics") or the capacity to visually perceive a particular attribute added to other features of objects, such as form, color, and movement, was fixed during human evolutionary lineage as a trait not shared with any great ape. Although prefrontal brain expansion is mentioned as responsible for the appearance of such human trait, no current knowledge exists on the role of prefrontal areas in the aesthetic perception. The visual brain consists of "several parallel multistage processing systems, each specialized in a given task such as, color or motion" [Bartels, A. & Zeki, S. (1999) Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. B 265, 2327-2332]. Here we report the results of an experiment carried out with magnetoencephalography which shows that the prefrontal area is selectively activated in humans during the perception of objects qualified as "beautiful" by the participants. Therefore, aesthetics can be hypothetically considered as an attribute perceived by means of a particular brain processing system, in which the prefrontal cortex seems to play a key role.

The "style scheme" grounds perception of paintings.

We studied the formation of style scheme (identification of the style that characterizes an artist) presenting 100 participants aesthetic visual stimuli. Participants were Spanish university students who volunteered: 72 women, 28 men of mean age 22.8 yr. Among those 50 were enrolled in History of Art and 50 students in Psychology. Stimuli belonged to different categories--High Art (pictures of well-known artists, like Van Gogh)/Popular Art (decorative pictures like Christmas postcards) and Representational (pictures with explicit meaning content, like a landscape)/Abstract (pictures without explicit meaning content, like Pollock's colored stains). Analysis using Signal Detection Theory techniques focused on how participants discriminate representational and abstract pictures. With High Art stimuli, participants can better discriminate representational paintings than abstract ones. However, the difference in discrimination between representational and abstract pictures diminishes among participants studying History of Art. It seems that prior education in art favors forming style schemes and to some extent enables the participant to detect the "meaning" in High Art abstract paintings.

Formación de esquemas en el reconocimiento de estímulos estéticos / The appearance of schemes when recognising aesthetic stimuli

En el marco de una amplia investigación en Psicología del Arte se ha realizado un experimento acerca de la formación de esquemas en el reconocimiento de estímulos estéticos en participantes con y sin enseñanza en Historia del Arte. Los estímulos estéticos utilizados abarcan categorías diversas siguiendo clasificaciones usuales, con obras tanto abstractas y figurativas y tanto artísticas (High Art) como decorativas (Popular Art). Para el análisis de los datos se han utilizado las técnicas de la Teoría de Detección de Señales. Los resultados permiten detectar la formación de dos tipos de esquema diferentes esquemas de contenido y esquemas de estilo e indican que la enseñanza aumenta de manera significativa la familiaridad de los estímulos artísticos. Dentro de esta categoría de estímulos, la familiaridad del estilo se incrementa en los sujetos con enseñanza respecto de los que no tienen enseñanza por encima de las diferencias que aparecen en la familiaridad del contenido. (AU)

An experiment about schemes formation when recognizing aesthetic stimuli has been performed in the context of a wide research in Psychology of Art. Participants with and without previous experience in History of Art were exposed to aesthetic stimuli of diverse categories: High Art vs. Popular Art / abstract vs. representational pictures. Signal Detection Theory was used as the technical framework in data analysis. The results allow detecting how two different kinds of schemes appear -content and style schemes. Previous teaching in History of Art improves familiarity with High Art stimuli, and mostly increases the capacity to establish schemes of style (AU)