The neural determinants of abstract beauty.

Abstract

We have enquired into the neural activity which correlates with the experience of beauty aroused by abstract paintings consisting of arbitrary assemblies of lines and colours. During the brain imaging experiments, subjects rated abstract paintings according to aesthetic appeal. There was low agreement on the aesthetic classification of these paintings among participants. Univariate analyses revealed higher activity with higher declared aesthetic appeal in both the visual areas and the medial frontal cortex. Additionally, representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed that the experience of beauty correlated with decodable patterns of activity in visual areas. These results are broadly similar to those obtained in previous studies on facial beauty. With abstract art, it was the involvement of visual areas implicated in the processing of lines and colours while with faces it was of visual areas implicated in the processing of faces. Both categories of aesthetic experience correlated with increased activity in medial frontal cortex. We conclude that the sensory areas participate in the selection of stimuli according to aesthetic appeal and that it is the co-operative activity between the sensory areas and the medial frontal cortex that is the basis for the experience of abstract visual beauty. Further, this co-operation is enabled by "experience dependent" functional connections, in the sense that currently the existence and high specificity of these connections can only be demonstrated during certain experiences.