MRI of an artistic judgment aptitude construct derived from Eysenck’s K factor (original) (raw)
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Neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic preference for paintings
NeuroReport, 2004
A study was conducted to determine the neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic preference for paintings using fMRI. Subjects were shown representational and abstract paintings in di¡erent formats (original, altered, ¢ltered), and instructed to rate them on aesthetic preference. Our primary results demonstrated that activation in right caudate nucleus decreased in response to decreasing preference, and that activation in bilateral occipital gyri, left cingulate sulcus, and bilateral fusiform gyri increased in response to increasing preference. We conclude that the di¡erential patterns of activation observed in the aforementioned structures in response to aesthetic preference are speci¢c examples of their roles in evaluating reward-based stimuli that vary in emotional valence. NeuroReport 15:893^897 c 2004 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Neuropsychology of Aesthetic Judgment of Ambiguous and Non-Ambiguous Artworks
Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 2017
Several affective and cognitive processes have been found to be pivotal in affecting aesthetic experience of artworks and both neuropsychological as well as psychiatric symptoms have been found to affect artistic production. However, there is a paucity of studies directly investigating effects of brain lesions on aesthetic judgment. Here, we assessed the effects of unilateral brain damage on aesthetic judgment of artworks showing part/whole ambiguity. We asked 19 unilaterally brain-damaged patients (10 left and 9 right brain damaged patients, respectively LBDP and RBDP) and 20 age- and education-matched healthy individuals (controls, C) to rate 10 Arcimboldo's ambiguous portraits (AP), 10 realistic Renaissance portraits (RP), 10 still life paintings (SL), and 10 Arcimboldo's modified portraits where only objects/parts are detectable (AO). They were also administered a Navon task, a facial recognition test, and evaluated on visuo-perceptual and visuo-constructional abilities....
Neurophysiological correlates of artistic image creation by representatives of artistic professions
Psychology in Russia: State of the Art
The steadily increasing demand for artistic professions brings to the fore the task of studying the phenomenon of art by researching the unique capacity of the human brain to create works of art in different spheres of creative activity. So far, only a few studies have investigated creativity-related brain activity in representatives of the creative professions. The aim of the empirical research was to study the neurophysiological correlates of artistic image creation by representatives of the artistic professions. The participants were 60 right-handed females aged 23-27, divided into three groups-artists (23 people), actors (17 people), and specialists who do not work in an artistic field (20 people). The mono-typing technique was used to model the creative artistic process. EEG signals were recorded in a resting state, and during four stages of the creation of an artistic image (viewing of monotypes, frustration, image creation, and thinking over the details) from 21 electrodes set on the scalp according to the International 10-20 System. We analyzed EEG coherence for each functional trial at theta (4.00-8.00 Hz), alpha1 (8.00-10.5 Hz), alpha2 (10.5-13.00 Hz), and beta (13.00-35.00 Hz) frequency bands. For statistical analysis, we used MANOVA and post hoc analysis. We found that the neurophysiological correlates of creating an artistic image are different at different stages of the creative process, and have different features for artists and actors. The actors primarily show dominance of right hemisphere activity, while close interaction of the hemispheres distinguishes the brains of the artists. The differences revealed in brain cortex functioning when artists or actors create an artistic image reflect different strategies of imaginative creative work by representatives of these professions.
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?
The modulation of personal traits in neural responses during the aesthetic experience of mundane art
To date, individual differences in the neuroaesthetics of mundane art are seldom studied. This study addresses group differences with regard to the neural mechanisms of aesthetic emotions and aesthetic judgments toward everyday designed products according to levels of everyday aesthetic experience and expertise in design. A fMRI experiment that included 26 college students was employed. The findings of this study suggest that rich everyday aesthetic experience elicits more brain activations in aesthetic judgments, and expertise in design elicits more brain activations in aesthetic emotions. Comparatively, rich everyday experience and expertise modulate the integration of external sensation and internal states, top-down attention, reward processing, and emotion regulation when viewing beautiful stimuli, whereas poor everyday experience and expertise modulate conscious assessment of self-relevant meaning as well as retrieval of negative memory and emotions when viewing ugly stimuli. These findings provide insights for enhancing aesthetic ability through daily life experience and instruction.
Art and brain: insights from neuropsychology, biology and evolution
Journal of Anatomy, 2010
Art is a uniquely human activity associated fundamentally with symbolic and abstract cognition. Its practice in human societies throughout the world, coupled with seeming non‐functionality, has led to three major brain theories of art. (1) The localized brain regions and pathways theory links art to multiple neural regions. (2) The display of art and its aesthetics theory is tied to the biological motivation of courtship signals and mate selection strategies in animals. (3) The evolutionary theory links the symbolic nature of art to critical pivotal brain changes in Homo sapiens supporting increased development of language and hierarchical social grouping. Collectively, these theories point to art as a multi‐process cognition dependent on diverse brain regions and on redundancy in art‐related functional representation.
How Neuroimaging Can Aid the Interpretation of Art
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2021
Cognitive neuroscience of art continues to be criticized for failing to provide interesting results about art itself. In particular, results of brain imaging experiments have not yet been utilized in interpretation of particular works of art. Here we revisit a recent study in which we explored the neuronal and behavioral response to painted portraits with a direct versus an averted gaze. We then demonstrate how fMRI results can be related to the art historical interpretation of a specific painting. The evidentiary status of neuroimaging data is not different from any other extra-pictorial facts that art historians uncover in their research and relate to their account of the significance of a work of art. They are not explanatory in a strong sense, yet they provide supportive evidence for the art writer’s inference about the intended meaning of a given work. We thus argue that brain imaging can assume an important role in the interpretation of particular art works.
Brain Research, 2007
The present study was conducted to determine the functional neuroanatomical correlates of aesthetic experience using slow cortical potentials (SCPs). Thirty participants without any particular background in the fine arts were presented with various representational (semiabstract) and abstract paintings dating from the 20th and 21st century in two experimental conditions, i.e. with or without stylistic information. The paintings had to be rated by the participants in terms of understanding and aesthetic qualities. In order to identify the cortical structures involved, the SCPs were subjected to current density analysis using lowresolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA). The comparison of representational and abstract paintings revealed significantly higher activation for representational artworks in several regions of the brain, predominantly in the left frontal lobe and bilaterally in the temporal lobes. According to the participants' reports, the representational artwork stimuli evoked more associations, accompanied by stronger activation of multimodal association areas in the temporal lobe. Furthermore, without stylistic information, the stimuli evoked stronger activation mainly in the left frontal and parietal lobes. Results also showed that stylistic information led to a better understanding of the paintings, but resulted in reduced cortical activation in the left hemisphere. This might have been due to less verbally oriented processing. These observations help explain the difficulties many beholders often have in appreciating abstract artworks.
Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise: A parametric fMRI study
Brain and Cognition, 2009
Several studies have demonstrated that acquired expertise influences aesthetic judgments. In this paradigm we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study aesthetic judgments of visually presented architectural stimuli and control-stimuli (faces) for a group of architects and a group of non-architects. This design allowed us to test whether level of expertise modulates neural activity in brain areas associated with either perceptual processing, memory, or reward processing. We show that experts and non-experts recruit bilateral medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and subcallosal cingulate gyrus differentially during aesthetic judgment, even in the absence of behavioural aesthetic rating differences between experts and non-experts. By contrast, activity in nucleus accumbens (NAcc) exhibits a differential response profile compared to OFC and subcallosal cingulate gyrus, suggesting a dissociable role between these regions in the reward processing of expertise. Finally, categorical responses (irrespective of aesthetic ratings) resulted in expertise effects in memory-related areas such as hippocampus and precuneus. These results highlight the fact that expertise not only modulates cognitive processing, but also modulates the response in reward related brain areas.
Art historians, artists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have long asserted that artists perceive the world differently than nonartists. Although empirical research on the nature and correlates of skilled drawing is limited, the available evidence supports this view: artists outperform nonartists on visual analysis and form recognition tasks and their perceptual advantages are correlated with and can be largely accounted for by drawing skill. The authors propose an integrative model to explain these results, derived from research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience on how category knowledge, attention, and motor plans influence visual perception. The authors claim that (a) artists' specialized, declarative knowledge of the structure of objects' appearances and (b) motor priming achieved via proceduralization and practice in an artistic medium both contribute to attention-shifting mechanisms that enhance the encoding of expected features in the visual field and account for artists' advantages in drawing and visual analysis. Suggestions for testing the model are discussed.