WHAT COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE SAY ABOUT AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE?

Abstract

Today, researchers can observe the neural responses to an aesthetic image in the human brain and examine the physiological reactions of viewers to an art object. Neuroaesthetics is a new field of study that characterizes the evolutionary history of the creation and evaluation of art by examining these responses. Neuroscientists, who have managed to map the neural pathways of the visual processing processes that occur in a person's brain while watching artworks, have been focusing on how the visual cortex processes information and reaches aesthetic judgment in recent years. The focus of this research is how a work of art is perceived, how the visual cortex processes information when reaching aesthetic judgments, color perception, synesthesia, and finally, the effects of brain damage on artists. In the study, firstly, the visual-spatial processes, which are the basic processes of visual perception, were discussed. In this way, object perception and the visual processes occurring in the brain during the perception of the art object were examined. In the next section, which draws attention to the perception of color as well as shape and spatial location, synesthesia, which has been the subject of many studies by neuroscientists in recent years and is known as the perception of one sense together with another sense, is discussed. Finally, studies on brain-damaged artists, one of the experimental methods most preferred by neuroscientists in research on aesthetic perception, and the data obtained from these studies are presented.