The Neural Basis of Object-Context Relationships on Aesthetic Judgment

Ulrich Kirk,Bernhard Baune

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003754

Abstract

The relationship between contextual information and object perception has received considerable attention in neuroimaging studies. In the work reported here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the relationship between aesthetic judgment and images of objects in their normal contextual setting versus images of objects in abnormal contextual settings and the underlying brain activity. When object-context relationships are violated changes in visual perception and aesthetic judgment emerges that exposes the contribution of vision to interpretations shaped by previous experience. We found that effects of context on aesthetic judgment modulates different memory sub-systems, while aesthetic judgment regardless of context recruit medial and lateral aspects of the orbitofrontal cortex, consistent with previous findings. Visual cortical areas traditionally associated with the processing of visual features are recruited in normal contexts, irrespective of aesthetic ratings, while prefrontal areas are significantly more engaged when objects are viewed in unaccustomed settings.

Highlights

Objects are usually associated with the context in which they appear, which provide expectations about which objects are likely to appear in a given contextual scene
The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between aesthetic judgment and objects in their normal contextual setting versus objects in abnormal contextual settings
In the results reported here we found a medial-lateral trend in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) suggesting a general response mechanism to aesthetic judgment regardless of context

Summary

Introduction

Objects are usually associated with the context in which they appear, which provide expectations about which objects are likely to appear in a given contextual scene. The importance of prior knowledge in determining how contextual association influences object recognition has been well-documented in behavioural studies These studies show that objects appearing in familiar or consistent contextual scenes are detected more accurately and processed more quickly than objects appearing in unfamiliar or inconsistent contexts [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. This suggests that objects and the context in which they appear are processed interactively, facilitating the perceptual processes involved in visual object recognition [8,9]. They found that the former elicited greater activity than the latter in the parahippocampal gyrus and in the retrosplenial cortex, which together comprise a cortical network processing contextual associations during object recognition [8,15]

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