Cognitive control and unusual decisions about beauty: an fMRI study.

Albert Flexas,Pedro De Miguel,Jaume Rossellã³,Enric Munar,Marcos Nadal

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00520

Abstract

Studies of visual esthetic preference have shown that people without art training generally prefer representational paintings to abstract paintings. This, however, is not always the case: preferences can sometimes go against this usual tendency. We aimed to explore this issue, investigating the relationship between “unusual responses” and reaction time in an esthetic appreciation task. Results of a behavioral experiment confirmed the trend for laypeople to consider as beautiful mostly representational stimuli and as not beautiful mostly abstract ones (“usual response”). Furthermore, when participants gave unusual responses, they needed longer time, especially when considering abstract stimuli as beautiful. We interpreted this longer time as greater involvement of cognitive mastering and evaluation processes during the unusual responses. Results of an fMRI experiment indicated that the anterior cingulate (ACC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and insula were the main structures involved in this effect. We discuss the possible role of these areas in an esthetic appreciation task.

Highlights

Decisions about the beauty of objects involve a variety of cognitive processes (Leder et al, 2004)
Cusack et al (2010) studied the impact of visual art in patient waiting rooms, and found that most of the patients preferred looking at landscape paintings
Repeated measures ANOVA Regarding the number of responses awarded to each category, our results show that, on average, participants significantly rated more stimuli as not beautiful (m = 119.69, SD = 26.64)

Summary

Introduction

Decisions about the beauty of objects involve a variety of cognitive processes (Leder et al, 2004). Cusack et al (2010) studied the impact of visual art in patient waiting rooms, and found that most of the patients preferred looking at landscape paintings. As a result of such processes, laypeople —those lacking specific training in the arts—generally show a marked preference for representational stimuli, that is to say, those depicting clearly discernible objects. These results support other experiments involving visual esthetic preference (Hekkert and van Wieringen, 1996; Furnham and Walker, 2001b; Nadal et al, 2010; Pihko et al, 2011). There seems to be a general tendency to prefer representational stimuli to abstract stimuli

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