Spectral brain signatures of aesthetic natural perception in the α and β frequency bands.

Abstract

During our everyday lives, visual beauty is often conveyed by sustained and dynamic visual stimulation, such as when we walk through an enchanting forest or watch our pets playing. Here, I devised an MEG experiment that mimics such situations: participants viewed 8 s videos of everyday situations and rated their beauty. Using multivariate analysis, I linked aesthetic ratings to 1) sustained MEG broadband responses and 2) spectral MEG responses in the α and β frequency bands. These effects were not accounted for by a set of high- and low-level visual descriptors of the videos, suggesting that they are genuinely related to aesthetic perception. My findings provide the first characterization of spectral brain signatures linked to aesthetic experiences in the real world.NEW & NOTEWORTHY In the real world, aesthetic experiences arise from complex and dynamic inputs. This study shows that such aesthetic experiences are represented in a spectral neural code: cortical α and β activity track our judgments of the aesthetic appearance of natural videos, providing a new starting point for studying the neural correlates of beauty through rhythmic brain activity.