Do you like Arcimboldo's? Esthetic appreciation modulates brain activity in solving perceptual ambiguity

P. M. Zeltner was a John Dewey aesthetician who greatly enhanced his understanding of Dewey's aesthetic experience. He argues that Dewey's aesthetics represent naturalistic metaphysics, and in Dewey, organic humans and music result in the existence of ‘of nature’, ‘in nature’, and ‘by nature’. From this point of view, music is defined as containing the mysterious things of nature, that is, the metaphysical things of nature. Aesthetic experience is a key concept of Dewey aesthetics and a medium for restoring continuity between daily life and art. Dewey introduces everyday aesthetic experiences as ‘an experience’. Zeltner argues that this an experience is an aesthetic experience “as a convergent completion,” and that all experiences in everyday life become an aesthetic experience as well as an experience when they have aesthetic structures and properties. Zeltner suggests dividing ‘an experience’ into a primary phase of aesthetic experience and an intentionally cultivated phase of aesthetic experience for understanding Dewey’s aesthetic experience. However, these two phases have a continuity that can never be separated.

Aesthetic package design: A behavioral, neural, and psychological investigation

‘Yanhuo Chi’: An everyday aesthetic tourism experience

Little is known about how the properties of our private mental world relate to the physical and functional properties of our brain. Studying synesthesia, where a particular experience evokes a separate additional sensory experience, offers the unique opportunity to study phenomenological experiences as a stable trait in healthy subjects. A common form of synesthesia is grapheme-color synesthesia, where a particular letter or number evokes a particular color experience. We studied the neural basis of qualitative different properties of the synesthetic experience by using individual differences in grapheme-color synesthesia. Specifically, the synesthetic color can be experienced "in the mind" (associator synesthetes) or "in the outside world" (projector synesthetes). Gray matter structure and functioning (imaged using voxel-based morphometry and functional magnetic resonance imaging, respectively) were examined in grapheme-color synesthetes (N = 42, 16 projectors and 26 associators) and nonsynesthetes. Results indicated partly shared mechanisms for all grapheme-color synesthetes, particularly in posterior superior parietal lobe, which is involved in the integration of sensory information. In addition, the nature of synesthetic experience was found to be mediated by distinct neural mechanisms. The outside-world experience is related to brain areas involved in perceiving and acting in the outside world (visual cortex, auditory cortex, motor cortex) as well as frontal brain areas. In contrast, the in-the-mind experience is related to the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, known for their role in memory. Thus, the different subjective experiences are related to distinct neural mechanisms. Moreover, the properties of subjective experiences are in accordance with functional properties of the mediating brain mechanisms.

There is a bifurcation between shenghuo meixue and everyday aesthetics. The disparity is observed on critical reflection on everydayness, the recognition of negative aesthetic qualities and experience, and the expectation of defamiliarization. In the Neo-Confucian practice of gewu or investigating things, one may find another Chinese inspiration for dealing with the familiar, ordinary, and routine aesthetically. Gewu offers another possibility of “experiencing the ordinary as ordinary”. It can lead to an aesthetical immersive experience, characterized by a sensuous and intuitive recognition of the appropriateness of everyday things dwelling in their contexts, as well as a cosmic understanding of generative power of the universe that is both profound and poetic. By contemplating aesthetic experience facilitated by gewu, aesthetic experience is typically not individual per se, but collective in the sense that many prima facie private and personal aesthetic experiences are possible only because of the collective underneath.

When confronted with an ambiguous abstract painting, individuals may initially experience subtle negative emotions such as confusion or uncertainty. However, once such negative emotions are resolved, a sense of interest that fosters positive emotions can arise. Contemporary psychological accounts of aesthetic experience propose that the formation of aesthetic experience entails an interaction between rapid and deliberative processing stages. However, direct empirical support for this hypothesis remains limited and the neural processes underlying this sequence of experiences are yet to be elucidated. In the present study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated whether two key regions implicated in aesthetic experience, the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) and the insula, represent preference for abstract paintings in a similar or distinct manner across rapid and deliberative processing stages. By applying representational similarity analysis (RSA) to neuroimaging data, this study aimed to identify spatial neural representations associated with aesthetic evaluations at each processing stage. The results revealed that preference was represented in circumscribed regions, including the insula and mOFC, at the moment of perception but in more widespread regions during later deliberative evaluations. The broader recruitment observed during the later stage may reflect the contribution of multiple cognitive processes underlying aesthetic evaluations. Elucidating the relationships between these regions will be a key focus of future research to clarify how aesthetic experience is processed.

IntroductionRambling natural landscapes or landscape gardens may invoke positive emotions. However, the manner in which people experience landscape gardens and the cortical differences in the appreciation of the naturalness and artificiality of landscapes remain unknown.MethodsThis study scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed photographs of natural landscapes and landscape gardens and performed scene type judgment task.ResultsAs predicted, we identified brain regions that were associated with perceptual process, cognitive process, and rewarding experience when appreciating natural landscapes and landscape gardens without color preference. Meanwhile, the contrast between the appreciation of landscape gardens and natural landscapes was characterized by stronger activations of the inferior occipital lobe, the left superior parietal lobule (SPL), the right fusiform gyrus, the right cuneus, and the right hippocampus.ConclusionsResponses in these regions indicate that the appreciation of landscape gardens and natural landscapes relies on common cortical regions, and suggest the possibility that the inferior occipital lobe, the SPL, the fusiform gyrus, and the cuneus may be specifically associated with the appreciation of landscape gardens.

The first papers on functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) were published just fifteen years ago, and in the relative short time since, FMRI has assumed a major role in mapping human brain functions. A search of the term “FMRI” in the medline database reveals that more than 5000 peer reviewed original articles have been produced world-wide, a number which has increased exponentially, since last year alone more than one FMRI article a day was published. Almost nine out of ten publications cover either technical aspects of FMRI or the neurophysiological research concerned with the function of the human brain in normal subjects. The latter field is undergoing an explosive growth due to several distinctly advantageous characteristics of FMRI. These include total noninvasiveness, relatively high spatial and temporal resolution, and the ease of imaging the underlying anatomy. In addition, state-of-the-art whole brain FMRI can now be performed on almost all recently installed clinical MR scanners, and online analysis tools allow the visualization of neuronal activity at the level of the single subject (or patient) in real time. The non-invasive character means that subjects can be studied repeatedly, without harm, allowing for longitudinal studies. These benefits have thus led to a considerable growth of neurophysiological data of the human brain — normal and pathological. The development of applications of FMRI for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in patients with neurological, neurosurgical, or psychiatric diseases forms about ten per cent of the total number of publications since the beginning of the FMRI era, and this field is growing almost as fast as that of ‘neurophysiological FMRI’. This (at first view) limited share of clinical FMRI is actually a tremendous achievement, considering the fact that clinical FMRI is much more difficult to perform than non-clinical FMRI. The reasons for this are multiple and pertain to all aspects of functional imaging. First, at the design stage of a FMRI experiment, compared to the paradigms or stimuli employed in the neurophysiological study of volunteers, those that will be used to elucidate neuronal activity in patients will have to be adapted to their pathology. Second, at the stage of acquiring the functional scans, acquisition time will often be much more limited than in young healthy volunteers. Third, the post-processing of the FMRI data will often have to be altered or improved due to the presence of ‘unexpected’ signals from the brain abnormalities.

Differential Neural Activation for Updating Rule versus Stimulus Information in Working Memory

Beyond beauty: Ugly and borderline tourism aesthetic experiences

IntroductionWithin the technology education research field, aesthetics has primarily been treated as either related to artifacts, design processes and innovation, or as related to students’ enjoyment, appreciation, and participation in technology and technology education. This study focuses on the role of aesthetics in technology learning more specifically the learning of programming. Previous research has pointed to aesthetics as important for the learning of programming, e.g., that programming activities in higher education typically involve experiences of frustration. While previous research is primarily based on student reports, there is a need for further exploration of processes of learning to program. The aim of this study is to explore the role of aesthetics for student learning to program in and what these processes may mean in relation to a disciplinary aesthetics of the technology subject.MethodsThe study was part of a design-based study with the overall purpose to develop the teaching of programming in lower secondary school. Data was collected from a programming task designed and implemented in school-year 9 (the students were aged 15–16) in Technology in two lower secondary classes. In total, three teachers participated in the implementation. The students pair-programmed Lego robots that should perform specific movements, such as following a curved line. Each group recorded their coding process along with audio, resulting in videos that documented the gradual evolution of their programs. These videos, capturing the real-time programming and associated student and teacher conversations, serve as the data for this study. In order to analyze the role of aesthetics in classroom conversations a Practical Epistemology Analysis was applied.ResultsThe results show that aesthetic judgments were important for orienting learning toward (1) the movement of the robot and (2) the ways to be in the programming activity. During the programming activity, the students expressed feelings of frustration but also joy and humor.DiscussionThe findings concur with previous research and contribute to further understanding the role of negative and positive aesthetic experiences in the teaching and learning of programming. The importance of the objects of aesthetic experience found in this study are discussed as part of a disciplinary aesthetic of programming.

Compared with traditional Western landscape paintings, Chinese traditional landscape paintings usually apply a reversed-geometric perspective and concentrate more on contextual information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we discovered an intracultural bias in the aesthetic appreciation of Western and Eastern traditional landscape paintings in European and Chinese participants. When viewing Western and Eastern landscape paintings in an fMRI scanner, participants showed stronger brain activation to artistic expressions from their own culture. Europeans showed greater activation in visual and sensory-motor brain areas, regions in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and hippocampus when viewing Western compared to Eastern landscape paintings. Chinese participants exhibited greater neural activity in the medial and inferior occipital cortex and regions of the superior parietal lobule in response to Eastern compared to Western landscape paintings. On the behavioral level, the aesthetic judgments also differed between Western and Chinese participants when viewing landscape paintings from different cultures; Western participants showed for instance higher valence values when viewing Western landscapes, while Chinese participants did not show this effect when viewing Chinese landscapes. In general, our findings offer differentiated support for a cultural modulation at the behavioral level and in the neural architecture for high-level aesthetic appreciation.

Background: The negative symptoms of schizophrenia include deficits in emotional expression and motivation. These deficits are stable over the course of illness and respond poorly to current medications. Previous studies have focused on negative symptoms as a single category; however, individual symptoms might be related to separate neurological disturbances. We analyzed data from the Functional Biomedical Informatics Research Network dataset to explore the relationship between individual negative symptoms and functional brain activity during an auditory oddball task. Methods: Functional magnetic resonance imaging was conducted on 89 schizophrenia patients and 106 healthy controls during a two-tone auditory oddball task. Blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal during the target tone was correlated with severity of five negative symptom domains from the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms. Results: The severity of alogia, avolition/apathy and anhedonia/asociality was negatively correlated with BOLD activity in distinct sets of brain regions associated with processing of the target tone, including basal ganglia, thalamus, insular cortex, prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate and parietal cortex. Conclusions: Individual symptoms were related to different patterns of functional activation during the oddball task, suggesting that individual symptoms might arise from distinct neural mechanisms. This work has potential to inform interventions that target these symptom-related neural disruptions.

Stimulus-driven attention can improve working memory (WM) when drawn to behaviorally relevant information, but the neural mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test competing hypotheses regarding the nature of the benefits of stimulus-driven attention to WM: that stimulus-driven attention benefits WM directly via salience detection, that stimulus-driven attention benefits WM incidentally via cognitive control mechanisms recruited to reduce interference from salient features, or that both mechanisms are co-involved in enhancing WM for salient information. To test these hypotheses, we observed activation in brain regions associated with cognitive control and salience detection. We found 2 cognitive control regions that were associated with enhanced memory for salient stimuli: a region in the right superior parietal lobule and a region in the right inferior frontal junction. No regions associated with salience detection were found to show this effect. These fMRI results support the hypothesis that benefits to WM from stimulus-driven attention occur primarily as a result of cognitive control and top-down factors rather than pure bottom-up aspects of stimulus-driven attention.

Viewing artworks: Contributions of cognitive control and perceptual facilitation to aesthetic experience