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Neuroaesthetics: a Review Di Dio Cinzia1 and Gallese Vittorio1,2

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Neuroaesthetics: a Review Di Dio Cinzia1 and Gallese Vittorio1,2 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Neuroaesthetics: a review Di Dio Cinzia1 and Gallese Vittorio1,2 Neuroaesthetics is a relatively young field within cognitive great heterogeneity across results from the investigations neuroscience, concerned with the neural underpinnings of that have attempted to clarify the neural correlates associ- aesthetic experience of beauty, particularly in visual art. ated with aesthetic experiences. Such discrepancy may Neuroscientific investigations have approached this area using also be because of the lack of a fixed consensus on the imaging and neurophysiological techniques, such as functional definition of ‘aesthetic experience’. Thus, it is important, magnetic resonance (fMRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) before going over the empirical findings, to specify what and electroencephalography (EEG). The results produced so notion of aesthetics we refer to. In our definition, an far are very heterogeneous. Nonetheless, an overall view of the aesthetic experience is one that allows the beholder to findings suggests that the aesthetic experience of visual ‘to perceive-feel-sense’ an artwork (from the Greek aisth- artworks is characterized by the activation of: sensorimotor ese-aisthanomai), which in turn implies the activation of areas; core emotional centres; and reward-related centres. In sensorimotor, emotional and cognitive mechanisms. the present review, we discuss the functional relevance of these activations and propose that aesthetic experience is a The present review is confined to the neuroaesthetics of multilevel process exceeding a purely visual analysis of visual arts and describes the relative findings discussing artworks and relying upon visceromotor and somatomotor their relevance within the framework of the above defi- resonance in the beholder. nition. Addresses 1 Universita` degli Studi di Parma, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, The neural correlates of aesthetic experiences via Volturno 39/E, 43100 Parma, Italy The aesthetic experience of a visual artwork begins with a 2 Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, (IIT) Unita` di Parma, Parma, Italy visual analysis of the stimulus, which then undergoes Corresponding author: Cinzia, Di Dio ([email protected]) and further levels of processing. This progression of processes Vittorio, Gallese ([email protected]) may lead to an aesthetic experience on the basis of, most likely, some biological and embodied mechanisms that, in turn, can be modulated by factors such as the context, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2009, 19:682–687 individuals’ interest in the artwork, prior knowledge and This review comes from a themed issue on familiarity (e.g. [2]). Thus, one possibility for the hetero- Neurobiology of behaviour geneity observed across the results of the studies dealing Edited by Catherine Dulac and Giacomo Rizzolatti with neuroaesthetics is that they may reflect the output of different aesthetic processing levels [3,4]. Even more Available online 12th October 2009 fundamental is the distinction between emotions directly 0959-4388/$ – see front matter associated with aesthetics and the cognitive processes # 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. that may produce rewarding experiences in the beholder. DOI 10.1016/j.conb.2009.09.001 This distinction highlights concepts of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic appraisal, which can be related to the emotional and cognitive aspects of aesthetic experiences, respectively. Introduction Neuroaesthetics is a term coined by Zeki [1] and refers to Aesthetics and reward the study of the neural bases of beauty perception in art. The study of neuroaesthetics has mostly dealt with aes- Zeki’s approach to art is modelled on his understanding of thetic appraisal, in that participants are usually asked to how the visual brain works, in particular on its ability to explicitly judge a visual stimulus either as beautiful or detect constants (i.e. unchanging properties of objects or ugly. Kawabata and Zeki [5] used fMRI to investigate the situations) with the aim of obtaining true knowledge neural correlates of beauty perception during the obser- about the world [1]. In this process, the brain (as the vation of different categories of paintings (landscapes, artist) needs to discard inessential information from the portraits, etc.) that were judged by participants beautiful, visual world in order to represent the proper character of neutral or ugly. The core imaging results revealed differ- objects. ent brain activations for judged-beautiful stimuli versus both neutral and ugly images in medial orbitofrontal Notwithstanding the conceptual strength of Zeki’s par- cortex (OFC). The differential activation observed in allelism, studying basic neural mechanisms underpinning OFC consisted in decreased activity with respect to the brain response to art and the ensuing aesthetic baseline, with judged-ugly stimuli evoking the lowest experience is a complex issue. For one thing, there is level of activation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 2009, 19:682–687 www.sciencedirect.com Neuroesthetics: a review Di Dio and Gallese 683 Using a similar methodological approach, Vartanian and Activation of parietal regions for aesthetic stimuli Goel [6] carried out an event-related fMRI study, in [5,9,10] brings support to the idea that aesthetic experi- which explicit aesthetic preference for representational ence is characterized by visuo-spatial coding as well as, versus abstract paintings was investigated in three importantly, by motor mapping. In fact, there is now stimulus-versions: originals, altered and filtered. Partici- consistent evidence that the posterior parietal cortex, pants indicated their preference with a button press at including the intraparietal regions, is part of the motor each stimulus presentation. Representational paintings system, playing a fundamental role in visuomotor trans- evoked higher preference than abstract paintings. In formations (for a review, see [11]). both categories, original paintings elicited the highest preference. Brain imaging results showed decreased Involvement of parietal and premotor areas in aesthetic activation in caudate nucleus with decreasing prefer- experience was observed in the fMRI study of Jacobsen ence for the observed paintings, suggesting that aes- et al. [12]. Here, participants were required to make an thetic experience also relies on areas involved in the aesthetic appraisal of abstract geometrical shapes, whose processing of stimuli holding reward properties [7]. symmetry and level of complexity had been manipulated. Additionally, increasing preference for the presented Behaviourally, symmetry was shown to strongly affect paintings elicited increased activation in several areas, aesthetic judgment, followed by stimulus complexity. including the left anterior cingulate sulcus, an area The imaging results indicated that, in the comparison of known to be involved in reward-related processing of symmetry judgment and aesthetic judgment tasks versus stimuli that vary in emotional valence (see [8]fora the control condition (observation of an arrow), activations review). were enhanced in areas subserving visuomotor processes, including the intraparietal sulcus and the ventral premotor Aesthetics and visuomotor processing cortex, in both conditions (see also [13] below). A recent study by Cela-Conde et al. [9] investigated gender-related similarities and differences in the neural correlates of beauty using a set of images of either artistic Aesthetics and embodiment paintings or natural objects, divided into five groups: It has been recently proposed that a crucial element of abstract art; classic art; impressionist art; postimpressio- aesthetic experience of artworks consists of the activation nist art; photographs of landscapes, artifacts, urban scenes of the embodied simulation of actions, emotions, and and true-life depictions. Through magnetoencephalogra- corporeal sensations, and that these mechanisms are phy (MEG), it was shown enhanced activation for universal [14]. This proposal challenges more standard ‘judged-beautiful versus judged-ugly’ stimuli in several accounts of aesthetic experience privileging the primacy parietal foci, bilaterally for women and mainly in the right of cognition in our responses to art. This hypothesis hemisphere for men, with a latency of 300 ms after [14], echoing historical views put forward, among stimulus offset (Figure 1a). others, by the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, stresses the empathic nature of the relationship automati- Activation of parietal areas during aesthetic experience cally established between artworks and beholders [15– was also shown in a recent fMRI study of Cupchik et al. 17], and capitalizes upon the discovery of the mirror [10], in which participants viewed various categories mechanism [18]. According to this hypothesis, the of representational paintings (portraits, nudes, still-life embodied view of aesthetic experience consists of two and landscapes) that were classified as ‘hard-edge’ components: firstly, the relationship between embodied (containing well-defined forms) and as ‘soft-edge’ (con- simulation-driven empathic feelings in the observer and taining ill-defined forms). The underling rationale for the representational content (the actions, intentions, this classification was based on the hypothesis that objects, emotions and sensations portrayed in a given ‘soft-edge’ paintings, by virtue of their structure, should painting or sculpture); secondly, the relationship between facilitate aesthetic
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