Whether in performing arts, sporting, or everyday contexts, when we watch others move, we tend to enjoy bodies moving in synchrony. Our enjoyment of body movements is further enhanced by our own ...prior experience with performing those movements, or our ‘embodied experience’. The relationships between movement synchrony and enjoyment, as well as embodied experience and movement enjoyment, are well known. The interaction between enjoyment of movements, synchrony, and embodiment is less well understood, and may be central for developing new approaches for enriching social interaction. To examine the interplay between movement enjoyment, synchrony, and embodiment, we asked participants to copy another person's movements as accurately as possible, thereby gaining embodied experience of movement sequences. Participants then viewed other dyads performing the same or different sequences synchronously, and we assessed participants' recognition of having performed these sequences, as well as their enjoyment of each movement sequence. We used functional near‐infrared spectroscopy to measure cortical activation over frontotemporal sensorimotor regions while participants performed and viewed movements. We found that enjoyment was greatest when participants had mirrored the sequence and recognised it, suggesting that awareness of embodiment may be central to enjoyment of synchronous movements. Exploratory analyses of relationships between cortical activation and enjoyment and recognition implicated the sensorimotor cortices, which subserve action observation and aesthetic processing. These findings hold implications for clinical research and therapies seeking to foster successful social interaction.
We examine how embodiment gained through physically mirroring another person's movements can modulate observers' enjoyment of synchronous movements performed by dyads. The findings demonstrate how observers' ability to recognize movement sequences they have mirrored (i.e., embodied), predicts their enjoyment of the same movements performed synchronously by others, and further predicts activation of sensorimotor brain areas associated movement prediction and matching (i.e., imitation).
Compared to audio only (AO) conditions, audiovisual (AV) information can enhance the aesthetic experience of a music performance. However, such beneficial multimodal effects have yet to be studied in ...naturalistic music performance settings. Further, peripheral physiological correlates of aesthetic experiences are not well-understood. Here, participants were invited to a concert hall for piano performances of Bach, Messiaen, and Beethoven, which were presented in two conditions: AV and AO. They rated their aesthetic experience (AE) after each piece (Experiment 1 and 2), while peripheral signals (cardiorespiratory measures, skin conductance, and facial muscle activity) were continuously measured (Experiment 2). Factor scores of AE were significantly higher in the AV condition in both experiments. LF/HF ratio, a heart rhythm that represents activation of the sympathetic nervous system, was higher in the AO condition, suggesting increased arousal, likely caused by less predictable sound onsets in the AO condition. We present partial evidence that breathing was faster and facial muscle activity was higher in the AV condition, suggesting that observing a performer's movements likely enhances motor mimicry in these more voluntary peripheral measures. Further, zygomaticus (‘smiling’) muscle activity was a significant predictor of AE. Thus, we suggest physiological measures are related to AE, but at different levels: the more involuntary measures (i.e., heart rhythms) may reflect more sensory aspects, while the more voluntary measures (i.e., muscular control of breathing and facial responses) may reflect the liking aspect of an AE. In summary, we replicate and extend previous findings that AV information enhances AE in a naturalistic music performance setting. We further show that a combination of self-report and peripheral measures benefit a meaningful assessment of AE in naturalistic music performance settings.
This paper has a rather audacious purpose: to present a comprehensive theory explaining, and further providing hypotheses for the empirical study of, the multiple ways by which people respond to art. ...Despite common agreement that interaction with art can be based on a compelling, and occasionally profound, psychological experience, the nature of these interactions is still under debate. We propose a model, The Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception (VIMAP), with the goal of resolving the multifarious processes that can occur when we perceive and interact with visual art. Specifically, we focus on the need to integrate bottom-up, artwork-derived processes, which have formed the bulk of previous theoretical and empirical assessments, with top-down mechanisms which can describe how individuals adapt or change within their processing experience, and thus how individuals may come to particularly moving, disturbing, transformative, as well as mundane, results. This is achieved by combining several recent lines of theoretical research into a new integrated approach built around three processing checks, which we argue can be used to systematically delineate the possible outcomes in art experience. We also connect our model's processing stages to specific hypotheses for emotional, evaluative, and physiological factors, and address main topics in psychological aesthetics including provocative reactions—chills, awe, thrills, sublime—and difference between “aesthetic” and “everyday” emotional response. Finally, we take the needed step of connecting stages to functional regions in the brain, as well as broader core networks that may coincide with the proposed cognitive checks, and which taken together can serve as a basis for future empirical and theoretical art research.
•Introduce integrated model of top-down and bottom-up processes underlying art viewing.•Posit five outcomes and seven stages which account for all main ways of responding to art.•Systematic approach to understanding wide range of evaluations, meaning-making, and emotions.•Connect, for the first time, processing stages to specific correlates of the brain.
•Aesthetic appreciation signals optimal perceptual learning.•Beauty appreciation inhibits motor behaviour to foster learning.•Immobility during aesthetic appreciation favors perceptual ...processing.•Correlates of aesthetic appreciation are similar across sensory and artistic domains.•The experience of beauty motivates to tolerate uncertainty.
According to a millennial-old philosophical debate, aesthetic emotions have been connected to knowledge acquisition. Recent scientific evidence, collected across different disciplinary domains, confirms this link, but also reveals that motor inhibition plays a crucial role in the process. In this review, we discuss multidisciplinary results and propose an original account of aesthetic appreciation (the stopping for knowledge hypothesis) framed within the predictive coding theory. We discuss evidence showing that aesthetic emotions emerge in correspondence with an inhibition of motor behavior (i.e., minimizing action), promoting a simultaneous perceptual processing enhancement, at the level of sensory cortices (i.e., optimizing learning). Accordingly, we suggest that aesthetic appreciation may represent a hedonic feedback over learning progresses, motivating the individual to inhibit motor routines to seek further knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, the neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies we review reveal the presence of a strong association between aesthetic appreciation and the activation of the dopaminergic reward-related circuits. Finally, we propose a number of possible applications of the stopping for knowledge hypothesis in the clinical and education domains.
Chuquichambi and colleagues recently questioned the prevailing belief that a universal human visual preference exists for curved shapes and lines. Their comprehensive meta-analysis demonstrated that ...while curvature preference is widespread, it is not universally constant or invariant. By revisiting their dataset, we made an intriguing discovery: a negative relationship between curvature preference and an object's "affordances." Taking an embodiment perspective into account, we propose an explanation for this phenomenon, suggesting that the diminished curvature preference in objects with abundant affordances can be understood through the lens of embodied cognition.
Empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics study two main issues: the valuation of sensory objects and art experience. These two issues are often treated as if they were intrinsically interrelated: ...Research on art experience focuses on how art elicits aesthetic pleasure, and research on valuation focuses on special categories of objects or emotional processes that determine the aesthetic experience. This entanglement hampers progress in empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics and limits their relevance to other domains of psychology and neuroscience. Substantial progress in these fields is possible only if research on aesthetics is disentangled from research on art. We define aesthetics as the study of how and why sensory stimuli acquire hedonic value. Under this definition, aesthetics becomes a fundamental topic for psychology and neuroscience because it links hedonics (the study of what hedonic valuation is in itself) and neuroeconomics (the study of how hedonic values are integrated into decision making and behavioral control). We also propose that this definition of aesthetics leads to concrete empirical questions, such as how perceptual information comes to engage value signals in the reward circuit or why different psychological and neurobiological factors elicit different appreciation events for identical sensory objects.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will affect almost every aspect of our lives and replace many of our jobs. On one view, machines are well suited to take over automated tasks and humans would remain ...important to creative endeavors. In this essay, I examine this view critically and consider the possibility that AI will play a significant role in a quintessential creative activity, the appreciation and production of visual art. This possibility is likely even though attributes typically important to viewers-the agency of the artist, the uniqueness of the art and its purpose might not be relevant to AI art. Additionally, despite the fact that art at its most powerful communicates abstract ideas and nuanced emotions, I argue that AI need not understand ideas or experience emotions to produce meaningful and evocative art. AI is and will increasingly be a powerful tool for artists. The continuing development of aesthetically sensitive machines will challenge our notions of beauty, creativity, and the nature of art.
Empirical aesthetics has found its way into mainstream cognitive science. Until now, most research has focused either on identifying the internal processes that underlie a perceiver’s aesthetic ...experience or on identifying the stimulus features that lead to a specific type of aesthetic experience. To progress, empirical aesthetics must integrate these approaches into a unified paradigm that encourages researchers to think in terms of temporal dynamics and interactions between: (i) the stimulus and the perceiver; (ii) different systems within the perceiver; and (iii) different layers of the stimulus. At this critical moment, empirical aesthetics must also clearly identify and define its key concepts, sketch out its agenda, and specify its approach to grow into a coherent and distinct discipline.
For more than two millennia, theoretical reflections on aesthetic perception and the creation of aesthetically appealing objects have been an important domain of humanist scholarship.Empirical aesthetics complements this tradition by adopting scientific methodology and providing evidence-based, reproducible answers to both longstanding and recently arisen questions.While empirical aesthetics has largely remained marginal since its foundation by Fechner in the mid-19th century, it is now about to be more broadly acknowledged as an important subfield of scientific research.
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