Abstract
Previous behavioral studies on aesthetics demonstrated that there was a close association between perceived action and aesthetic appreciation. However, few studies explored whether motor imagery would influence aesthetic experience and its neural substrates. In the current study, Chinese calligraphy was used as the stimuli to explore the relationship between the motor imagery and the aesthetic judgments of a participant using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The imaging results showed that, compared with the baseline, the activation of the brain regions [e.g., anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), putamen, and insula] involved in perceptual processing, cognitive judgments, aesthetic emotional, and reward processing was observed after the participants performed motor imagery tasks. The contrast analyses within aesthetic judgments showed that the kinesthetic imagery significantly activated the middle frontal gyrus, postcentral gyrus, ACC, and thalamus. Generally, these areas were considered to be closely related to positive aesthetic experience and suggested that motor imagery, especially kinesthetic imagery, might be specifically associated with the aesthetic appreciation of Chinese calligraphy.
Highlights
The creation of an artwork requires motor activity (Bullot, 2009; Ticini et al, 2014)
This study aims to investigate whether active motor imagery of the creative action of an artist is more likely to influence the aesthetic experience of an observer than the baseline condition (BC)
The Reaction Rate of Aesthetic Judgments A generalized linear mixed model was performed using the R Software (R Core Team, 2019) with the lme4 package (Bates et al, 2015) to examine how motor imagery affects the aesthetic judgment of a participant, with aesthetic judgment as the dependent variable and imagery type as the fixed factors; random intercepts for participants and slopes were allowed to vary in accordance with the imagery type
Summary
The creation of an artwork requires motor activity (Bullot, 2009; Ticini et al, 2014). Previous studies have revealed that, in pictorial art, the creative action of the artist could be imagined by observers automatically through different clues, such as the brushstrokes on the canvas or the traces on the sculpture (Taylor et al, 2012; Sbriscia-Fioretti et al, 2013; Ticini et al, 2014; Hoenen et al, 2017). The perceptual communications of observers with artworks could be increased by imagination Both the empirical studies and theoretical perspectives have suggested that the perception of the creative action of an artist plays an important role in the aesthetic experience of the observers. Whether perceived creative action through active motor imagery would influence aesthetic experiences remains unclear
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