From visual perception to aesthetic appeal: Brain responses to aesthetically appealing natural landscape movies

During aesthetically appealing visual experiences, visual content provides a basis for computation of affectively tinged representations of aesthetic value. How this happens in the brain is largely unexplored. Using engaging video clips of natural landscapes, we tested whether cortical regions that respond to perceptual aspects of an environment (e.g., spatial layout, object content and motion) were directly modulated by rated aesthetic appeal. Twenty-four participants watched a series of videos of natural landscapes while being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and reported both continuous ratings of enjoyment (during the videos) and overall aesthetic judgments (after each video). Although landscape videos engaged a greater expanse of high-level visual cortex compared to that observed for images of landscapes, independently localized category-selective visual regions (e.g., scene-selective parahippocampal place area and motion-selective hMT+) were not significantly modulated by aesthetic appeal. Rather, a whole-brain analysis revealed modulations by aesthetic appeal in ventral (collateral sulcus) and lateral (middle occipital sulcus, posterior middle temporal gyrus) clusters that were adjacent to scene and motion selective regions. These findings suggest that aesthetic appeal per se is not represented in well-characterized feature- and category-selective regions of visual cortex. Rather, we propose that the observed activations reflect a local transformation from a feature-based visual representation to a representation of “elemental affect,” computed through information-processing mechanisms that detect deviations from an observer’s expectations. Furthermore, we found modulation by aesthetic appeal in subcortical reward structures but not in regions of the default-mode network (DMN) nor orbitofrontal cortex, and only weak evidence for associated changes in functional connectivity. In contrast to other visual aesthetic domains, aesthetically appealing interactions with natural landscapes may rely more heavily on comparisons between ongoing stimulation and well-formed representations of the natural world, and less on top-down processes for resolving ambiguities or assessing self-relevance

Visual Affect Around the World: A Large-scale Multilingual Visual Sentiment Ontology

Every culture and language is unique. Our work expressly focuses on the uniqueness of culture and language in relation to human affect, specifically sentiment and emotion semantics, and how they manifest in social multimedia. We develop sets of sentiment- and emotion-polarized visual concepts by adapting semantic structures called adjective-noun pairs, originally introduced by Borth et al. (2013), but in a multilingual context. We propose a new language-dependent method for automatic discovery of these adjective-noun constructs. We show how this pipeline can be applied on a social multimedia platform for the creation of a large-scale multilingual visual sentiment concept ontology (MVSO). Unlike the flat structure in Borth et al. (2013), our unified ontology is organized hierarchically by multilingual clusters of visually detectable nouns and subclusters of emotionally biased versions of these nouns. In addition, we present an image-based prediction task to show how generalizable language-specific models are in a multilingual context. A new, publicly available dataset of >15.6K sentiment-biased visual concepts across 12 languages with language-specific detector banks, >7.36M images and their metadata is also released.Comment: 11 pages, to appear at ACM MM'1

Empathy, engagement, entrainment: the interaction dynamics of aesthetic experience

A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions, emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perception–action and motion–emotion loops. The former involves the embodied visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer

Biophilic architecture: a review of the rationale and outcomes

Contemporary cities have high stress levels, mental health issues, high crime levels and ill health, while the built environment shows increasing problems with urban heat island effects and air and water pollution. Emerging from these concerns is a new set of design principles and practices where nature needs to play a bigger part called “biophilic architecture”. This design approach asserts that humans have an innate connection with nature that can assist to make buildings and cities more effective human abodes. This paper examines the evidence for this innate human psychological and physiological link to nature and then assesses the emerging research supporting the multiple social, environmental and economic benefits of biophilic architecture

The Observing facet of trait mindfulness predicts frequency of aesthetic experiences evoked by the arts

Mindfulness can foster an enhanced sensitivity to internal and external impressions, which could result in heightened subjective responses to works of art. So far though, very little is known about the connection between mindfulness and aesthetic responses to the arts, therefore the current study aimed to investigate whether there was an association between trait mindfulness and how often people report aesthetic experiences. We hypothesized that the Observing facet of mindfulness would positively predict the self-reported frequency of aesthetic experiences (aesthetic chills, feeling touched, and absorption). Participants in an online study (N = 207) completed the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire, an Aesthetic Experiences scale in relation to the area of the arts a participant encountered most frequently in their daily life, and a measure of aesthetic expertise. Controlling for aesthetic expertise and sex, linear regression revealed that the Observing facet of mindfulness was positively associated with aesthetic experience, as predicted. Non-reactivity positively predicted aesthetic experience, while Non-judging was negatively associated with aesthetic experience. Potential explanations for the association between these three facets of trait mindfulness and aesthetic responses are discussed in relation to information-processing models of aesthetic experience. The findings provide preliminary support for the premise that levels of dispositional mindfulness are associated with the frequency of intense emotional responses to the arts, and recommendations for further research studies are outlined

Individual ratings of vividness predict aesthetic appeal in poetry

Poems are highly complex aesthetic objects that vary across both objective stimulus features and subjectively experienced qualities. This study sought to determine which of a subset of subjective qualities—vividness of imagery experienced in reading, valence, and arousal of perceived emotion in a poem’s content—most determine aesthetic appeal for two highly regularized genres: haiku and sonnet. Participants recruited online using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk read and rated haiku and sonnets on four characteristics: valence, arousal, vividness, and aesthetic appeal. Our results indicate that individuals vary greatly in experiencing aesthetic pleasure, with high disagreement about which poems they found most appealing. However, across participants, vividness of imagery was the strongest contributor to aesthetic pleasure, followed by valence and arousal. While individual poems vary greatly in their appeal to individual readers, individuals generally agree about the perceived emotional valence of poems in both genres. This study also characterized a stimulus set of haiku suitable for further experimentation in aesthetics or emotion research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved

Stronger shared taste for natural aesthetic domains than for artifacts of human culture

Individuals can be aesthetically engaged by a diverse array of visual experiences (paintings, mountain vistas, etc.), yet the processes that support this fundamental mode of interaction with the world are poorly understood. We tested whether there are systematic differences in the degree of shared taste across visual aesthetic domains. In Experiment 1, preferences were measured for five different visual aesthetic domains using a between-subjects design. The degree of agreement amongst participants differed by domain, with preferences for images of faces and landscapes containing a high proportion of shared taste, while preferences for images of exterior architecture, interior architecture and artworks reflected strong individual differences. Experiment 2 used a more powerful within-subjects design to compare the two most well matched domains—natural landscapes and exterior architecture. Agreement across individuals was significantly higher for natural landscapes than exterior architecture, with no differences in reliability. These results show that the degree of shared versus individual aesthetic preference differs systematically across visual domains, even for photographic images of real-world content. The findings suggest that the distinction between naturally occurring domains (e.g. faces and landscape) versus artifacts of human culture (e.g. architecture and artwork) is a general organizational principle governing the presence of shared aesthetic taste. We suggest that the behavioral relevance of naturally occurring domains results in information processing, and hence aesthetic experience, that is highly conserved across individuals; artifacts of human culture, which lack uniform behavioral relevance for most individuals, require the use of more individual aesthetic sensibilities that reflect varying experiences and different sources of information

The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains

Visual aesthetic evaluations, which impact decision-making and well-being, recruit the ventral visual pathway, subcortical reward circuitry, and parts of the medial prefrontal cortex overlapping with the default-mode network (DMN). However, it is unknown whether these networks represent aesthetic appeal in a domain-general fashion, independent of domain-specific representations of stimulus content (artworks versus architecture or natural landscapes). Using a classification approach, we tested whether the DMN or ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) contains a domain-general representation of aesthetic appeal. Classifiers were trained on multivoxel functional MRI response patterns collected while observers made aesthetic judgments about images from one aesthetic domain. Classifier performance (high vs. low aesthetic appeal) was then tested on response patterns from held-out trials from the same domain to derive a measure of domain-specific coding, or from a different domain to derive a measure of domain-general coding. Activity patterns in category-selective VOT contained a degree of domain-specific information about aesthetic appeal, but did not generalize across domains. Activity patterns from the DMN, however, were predictive of aesthetic appeal across domains. Importantly, the ability to predict aesthetic appeal varied systematically; predictions were better for observers who gave more extreme ratings to images subsequently labeled as “high” or “low.” These findings support a model of aesthetic appreciation whereby domain-specific representations of the content of visual experiences in VOT feed in to a “core” domain-general representation of visual aesthetic appeal in the DMN. Whole-brain “searchlight” analyses identified additional prefrontal regions containing information relevant for appreciation of cultural artifacts (artwork and architecture) but not landscapes

Rapid timing of musical aesthetic judgments

In recent years, psychological models of perception have undergone reevaluation due to a broadening of focus toward understanding not only how observers perceive stimuli but also how they subjectively evaluate stimuli. Here, we investigated the time course of such aesthetic evaluations using a gating paradigm. In a series of experiments, participants heard excerpts of classical, jazz, and electronica music. Excerpts were of different durations (250 ms, 500 ms, 750 ms, 1,000 ms, 2,000 ms, 10,000 ms) or note values (eighth note, quarter note, half note, dotted-half note, whole note, and entire 10,000 ms excerpt). After each excerpt, participants rated how much they liked the excerpt on a 9-point Likert scale. In Experiment 1, listeners made accurate aesthetic judgments within 750 ms for classical and jazz pieces, while electronic pieces were judged within 500 ms. When translated into note values (Experiment 2), electronica and jazz clips were judged more quickly than classical. In Experiment 3, we manipulated the familiarity of the musical excerpts. Unfamiliar clips were judged more quickly (500 ms) than familiar clips (750 ms), but there was overall higher accuracy for familiar pieces. Finally, we investigated listeners’ aesthetic judgments continuously over the time course of more naturalistic (60 s) excerpts: Within 3 s, listeners’ judgments differed between most- and least-liked pieces. We suggest that such rapid aesthetic judgments represent initial gut-level decisions that are made quickly, but that even these initial judgments are influenced by characteristics such as genre and familiarity