Abstract
What are the neural mechanisms underlying beauty based on objective parameters and beauty based on subjective social construction? This study scanned participants with fMRI while they performed aesthetic judgments on concrete pictographs and abstract oracle bone scripts. Behavioral results showed both pictographs and oracle bone scripts were judged to be more beautiful when they referred to beautiful objects and positive social meanings, respectively. Imaging results revealed regions associated with perceptual, cognitive, emotional and reward processing were commonly activated both in beautiful judgments of pictographs and oracle bone scripts. Moreover, stronger activations of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and motor-related areas were found in beautiful judgments of pictographs, whereas beautiful judgments of oracle bone scripts were associated with putamen activity, implying stronger aesthetic experience and embodied approaching for beauty were elicited by the pictographs. In contrast, only visual processing areas were activated in the judgments of ugly pictographs and negative oracle bone scripts. Results provide evidence that the sense of beauty is triggered by two processes: one based on the objective parameters of stimuli (embodied natural beauty) and the other based on the subjective social construction (social endowed beauty).
Highlights
On each trial the stimulus was presented in the center of the screen for 2 s including response time in pseudo-random order, and was followed by a jittered 500–4000 ms inter-stimulus interval (ISI)
All remaining volumes from each participant were preprocessed with slice-scan time correction, spatially realigned to the first volume for correcting head movements, coregistered to the T1-weighted structural image, normalized to the standard template based on the MNI reference brain, resampled with voxel size of 3 × 3 × 3 mm[3], and spatially smoothed with an isotropic 8 mm full width-half-maximum (FWHM) Gaussian kernel
At the first level, a general linear model (GLM) was applied to the time-series data, in which stimulus onset was modeled as a single impulse response function, and convolved with the canonical haemodynamic response function (HRF)
Summary
Participants underwent 4 separate scanner runs; each run consisted of 12 blocks. Block order was fixed and counterbalanced across participants. On each trial the stimulus was presented in the center of the screen for 2 s including response time in pseudo-random order (event-related design), and was followed by a jittered 500–4000 ms inter-stimulus interval (ISI).
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