How Neuroimaging Can Aid the Interpretation of Art (original) (raw)
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Art, Meaning, and Perception: A Question of Methods for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Art
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2013
Neuroscience of art might give us traction with aesthetic issues. However it can be seen to have trouble modeling the artistically salient semantic properties of artworks. So if meaning really matters, and it does, even in aesthetic contexts, the prospects for this nascent field are dim. The issue boils down to a question of whether or not we can get a grip on the kinds of constraints present and available to guide interpretive behavior in our engagement with works of fine art. I argue that biased competition models of selective attention can be used to solve this problem, generalize to the affective content of our responses to artworks, and so show that research in cognitive neuroscience is germane to the types of problems of interest within the philosophy of art.
There has been considerable interest in recent years in whether, and if so to what degree, research in neuroscience can contribute to philosophical studies of mind, epistemology, language, and art. This interest has manifested itself in a range of research in the philosophy of music, dance, and visual art that draws on results from studies in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. 1 There has been a concurrent movement within empirical aesthetics that has produced a growing body of research in the cognitive neuroscience of art. 2 However, there has been very little collaboration between philosophy and the neuroscience of art. This is in part due, to be frank, to a culture of mutual distrust. Philosophers of art have been generally skeptical about the utility of empirical results to their research and vocally dismissive of the value of what has come to be called neuroaesthetics. Our counterparts in the behavioral sciences have been, in turn, skeptical about the utility of stubborn philosophical skepticism. Of course attitudes change…and who has the time to hold a grudge? So in what follows I would like to draw attention to two questions requisite for a rapprochement between philosophy of art and neuroscience. First, what is the cognitive neuroscience of art? And second, why should any of us (in philosophy at least) care?
2019
In this ongoing study we are interesting in investigating visual skills, cognitive understanding of an artworks and the observers’ brain response to the aestetic perception of the artwork. The study will involve a wide number of participants to the experiment, making our investigation a unique occasion to confirm data and outcomes from previous works described in literature. INTRODUCTION: AIMS AND MOTIVATION For some year neurosciences have begun to take an interest in art to try to understand the neurobiological bases of artistic production and to know which neurophysiological networks allow us to grasp how "beautiful" and/or "pleasant" or "unpleasant" and/or "ugly" a painting, a sculpture or an architectural work is. Every time an aesthetic judgment is formulated, different areas of our brain are activated. The techniques of recording cerebral electrical activity (EEG, Electroencephalography) and the modern neuroimaging techniques (as Functi...
Brain and Cognition, 2014
Many studies involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have exposed participants to paintings under varying task demands. To isolate neural systems that are activated reliably across fMRI studies in response to viewing paintings regardless of variation in task demands, a quantitative metaanalysis of fifteen experiments using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method was conducted. As predicted, viewing paintings was correlated with activation in a distributed system including the occipital lobes, temporal lobe structures in the ventral stream involved in object (fusiform gyrus) and scene (parahippocampal gyrus) perception, and the anterior insula-a key structure in experience of emotion. In addition, we also observed activation in the posterior cingulate cortex bilaterally-part of the brain's default network. These results suggest that viewing paintings engages not only systems involved in visual representation and object recognition, but also structures underlying emotions and internalized cognitions.
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
Artworks provide sets of sensory stimuli that allow special insights into cognitive processes complementing results obtained with other experimental paradigms. Examples are given from visual art and music using behavioral measures and neuroimaging technology (fMRI). The following topics are addressed: creation and maintenance of personal identity, difference or equivalence of aesthetic and moral judgments, appreciation of Eastern and Western visual art, differences in sensory processing of naturalistic and surrealistic art, importance and traps of mental frames and prejudices, effect of emotional priming on the central representation of sensory stimuli, value of single case studies, personality characteristics as predictors, and usefulness of controlled introspection in analyzing contents of episodic memory, in particular with respect to aesthetic and health-promoting appreciation of environments. Furthermore, the necessary distinction between anthropological universals and cultural or individual specifics is stressed in sensory processing of artworks.
Art, meaning, and aesthetics: The case for a cognitive neuroscience of art
2020
It is important to note that I am not suggesting that we should directly import the results of empirical psychology to aesthetics. The direct application of empirical results in aesthetics can, and very often does, go terribly wrong. What I suggest is that aesthetics should take some new paradigms of philosophy of perception seriously. The specific paradigm I am interested in here, the paradigm of multimodality, is based on a large body of empirical research. However, my aim is not to urge an empirical turn in aesthetics, but to urge a turn in aesthetics towards philosophy of perception, and this sometimes entails a turn towards empirically informed philosophy of perception.
Difference in brain activations during appreciating paintings and photographic analogs
Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014
Several studies have investigated neural correlates of aesthetic appreciation for paintings but to date the findings have been heterogeneous. This heterogeneity may be attributed to previous studies' measurement of aesthetic appreciation of not only the beauty of paintings but also the beauty of motifs of the paintings. In order to better elucidate the beauty of paintings, it seems necessary to compare aesthetic appreciation of paintings and photographic analogs which included corresponding real images. We prepared for famous painters' pictures and their photographic analogs which were set up to resemble each painting in order to investigate the hypothesis that there exist specific neural correlates associated with the aesthetic appreciation for paintings. Forty-four subjects participated in functional magnetic resonance study which required comparisons of aesthetic appreciation of paintings of still life and landscape versus photographic analogs including corresponding real...
Progress in Brain Research, 2018
The capacity for producing aesthetic items is also universal: painters, dancers, and musicians are not restricted to any culture or historical epoch. However, appreciating aesthetic attributes-what we may call "beauty"-goes beyond producing them in at least two aspects. First, "artists" (producers) make up a small fraction of human groups; on the contrary, "spectators" are numerous. Second, it is possible to appreciate aesthetic qualities in natural objects and events, such as sunsets on a beach, whales' songs, or flights of birds. These natural aesthetic items have no author. We cannot establish the phylogenetic appearance of the human competence for appreciating beauty. Neither fossil nor archaeological records contain evidences enough to ascertain the appearance of such capacity. It is not possible to ascertain whether spectators with ability enough for appreciating landscapes, dances, or songs did exist in previous human species. Producing beauty seems less elusive, though its origin is also difficult to establish. Regarding artworks, Paleolithic polychromies, for instance, are too developed an example of the presence of artisans. Some traces of early artists' work should exist. How can we detect them? In a previous work (Cela-Conde and Ayala, 2007), we have extensively examined early evidences of decorative, artistic, or symbolic object. We will not repeat again the arguments in favor of the eventually symbolic condition of burials, for instance. Since we are now interested in the coevolution of art and the brain, we will change the focus, searching for items of proof of mental correlates that might speak in favor of a capacity for appreciating beauty. 1 Neuroaesthetics Beyond some valuable precedents, such as Ramachandran and Zeki's ideas on art and the brain, the empirical field of neuroaesthetics started in 2004, when three different studies offered the first accounts of the activation of brain areas during aesthetic appreciation. Vartanian and Goel found brain activity related to preference for artworks in the right caudate nucleus, the left cingulate sulcus, and the bilateral fusiform gyri (Vartanian and Goel, 2004). Kawabata and Zeki identified activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) for Beautiful, compared with Ugly, stimuli, and also in the anterior cingulate gyrus in Beautiful vs Neutral stimuli (Kawabata and Zeki, 2004). In turn, Cela-Conde and collaborators found increased activity for Beautiful stimuli, compared with Not-beautiful, in the left prefrontal dorsolateral cortex (Cela-Conde et al., 2004). Since 2004, many related investigations have been published. Due to the different cognitive tasks asked of the participants, a large part of the brain has been identified as activated when aesthetic appreciation occurs (see Table 1).
The Golden Beauty: Brain Response to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures
PLoS ONE, 2007
Is there an objective, biological basis for the experience of beauty in art? Or is aesthetic experience entirely subjective? Using fMRI technique, we addressed this question by presenting viewers, naïve to art criticism, with images of masterpieces of Classical and Renaissance sculpture. Employing proportion as the independent variable, we produced two sets of stimuli: one composed of images of original sculptures; the other of a modified version of the same images. The stimuli were presented in three conditions: observation, aesthetic judgment, and proportion judgment. In the observation condition, the viewers were required to observe the images with the same mind-set as if they were in a museum. In the other two conditions they were required to give an aesthetic or proportion judgment on the same images. Two types of analyses were carried out: one which contrasted brain response to the canonical and the modified sculptures, and one which contrasted beautiful vs. ugly sculptures as judged by each volunteer. The most striking result was that the observation of original sculptures, relative to the modified ones, produced activation of the right insula as well as of some lateral and medial cortical areas (lateral occipital gyrus, precuneus and prefrontal areas). The activation of the insula was particularly strong during the observation condition. Most interestingly, when volunteers were required to give an overt aesthetic judgment, the images judged as beautiful selectively activated the right amygdala, relative to those judged as ugly. We conclude that, in observers naïve to art criticism, the sense of beauty is mediated by two non-mutually exclusive processes: one based on a joint activation of sets of cortical neurons, triggered by parameters intrinsic to the stimuli, and the insula (objective beauty); the other based on the activation of the amygdala, driven by one's own emotional experiences (subjective beauty).