Edward A. Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin
"Art reaches within: aesthetic experience, the self and the default mode network"
(2013)
[1]INTRODUCTION
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One aspect that has so far received little investigation is that of individual differences: although it is widely recognized that individuals can differ markedly in their aesthetic response, previous research in neuroaesthetics tended to utilize art pieces that were manipulated in a manner intended to have a consistent effect on observers’ preferences or that were generally highly regarded and often, widely known... It seems reasonable to expect that studying widely admired artwork can help uncover the universal aspects of aesthetic experience. But studying artworks that generate a diversity of responses can also be valuable. Brain imaging can, in principle, be used to probe the neural correlates of an experience in a manner dissociable from the external stimuli that gave rise to this experience. In particular, it is possible to capitalize on the differences in individual’s responses to artworks to search for commonalities in brain activity associated with the aesthetic experience itself, irrespective of the stimulus properties of specific works of art that gave rise to it.
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[2, boxed]KEY CONCEPT 2 | Aesthetic experience
Aesthetics is a discipline concerned with the perception, appreciation, and production of art. Aesthetic experiences, such as looking at paintings, listening to music or reading poems, are linked to the perception of external objects, but not to any apparent functional use the objects might have. Aesthetic experience involves more than preference, encompassing a variety of emotional responses ranging from beauty to awe, sublimity, and a variety of other (often knowledge-based) emotions.
HIGHLY INDIVIDUALIZED RESPONSES TO VISUAL ART
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Analysis of the behavioral responses revealed that responses were indeed highly individual: there was little agreement between observers regarding how moving each painting was... ...on average, each image was rated as highly moving by one subset of observers and rated poorly by another subset of observers... These results stand in contrast with the rather high agreement obtained when observers make preference judgments for real-world scenes...or attractiveness judgments for faces... As we shall see below, the low agreement between individuals in terms of their aesthetic response is what allowed us to disentangle the external attributes of specific stimuli from the internal (neural) states to which they gave rise.
...on average, observers used the highest (“4”) rating significantly less than 25% of the time... This is interesting given that...in rating sensory/perceptual attributes (e.g., perceived brightness) observers tend to distribute their responses across all available options. That the observers in our experiments behaved differently, and did not calibrate their responses so as to give a rating of “4” to roughly a quarter of the stimuli, suggests that they reserved this response for images which met a certain internal (and generally high) criterion.
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[6]THE DEFAULT MODE NETWORK AND SELF-REFERENTIAL MENTAL PROCESSING
A defining characteristic of the DMN—indeed, how it was discovered—is that it is suppressed when observers are engaged in demanding tasks that require them to focus on external stimuli, compared with its level of activity during passive viewing or periods of rest between the tasks. ...a “task-negative” network of brain regions that normally functions in an anticorrelated manner from “task-positive” networks... The finding that, in our own task, the cortical regions that overlap with previously identified components of the DMN...showed significant deactivation below their baseline (rest) level during a majority of the trials, those rated 1–3...is therefore consistent with what is known about the DMN. From this same perspective, the dramatic reduction of deactivation in the trials rated “4”...therefore seems puzzling. ...
Following its initial identification, further research showed that the DMN regions can maintain their baseline activity not only during periods of (waking) rest, but that they can escape deactivation, or even become activated above baseline, also during the performance of structured tasks. Ventral portions of the MPFC are involved in affective decision making processes, including (but not restricted to) encoding the subjective value of future rewards and assessing the emotional salience of stimuli... The anterior and dorsal portions of MPFC are active in tasks involving self-knowledge such as making judgments about oneself as well as about close others..., self-relevant moral decision-making and in “theory of mind” tasks that require gauging others’ perspectives. The PCC and medial temporal lobe regions are active during tasks that involve retrieving autobiographical memories as well as planning or simulating the future.
The DMN is thus emerging as a highly interconnected network of brain regions that support self-referential mental processing. Such processing is, of course, ubiquitous in everyday life and is undoubtedly important for normal functioning. In experimental settings it can occur spontaneously (e.g., as “mind wandering” during periods of rest) but it can also be triggered in structured tasks, by external stimuli that cause observers to draw on self-referential information (intentionally or automatically), or to engage in inwardly focused attention. ...
INTENSE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: A (NON-PERSONAL) EXTERNAL STIMULUS REACHES THE SELF
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We propose that certain artworks can “resonate” with an individual’s sense of self in a manner that has well-defined physiological correlates and consequences: the neural representations of those external stimuli obtain access to the neural substrates and processes concerned with the self—namely to regions of the DMN. This access, which other external stimuli normally do not obtain, allows the representation of the artwork to interact with the neural processes related to the self, affect them, and possibly even be incorporated into them (i.e., into the future, evolving representation of self). This hypothesis gains considerable support from the way that the fMRI responses evolved over time in the MPFC,... ...the initial predisposition of this DMN region was, for all external stimuli, to deactivate. But in contrast with the MPFC response to the artworks rated 1, 2, or 3, which was suppressed during image presentation and remained below baseline throughout the subsequent recovery..., in
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the 4-rated trials activity started recovering soon after stimulus presentation and then continued to rise above baseline... This is reminiscent of the MPFC recovery from deactivation observed when a highly self-relevant stimulus such as one’s own name is presented in a stream of self-irrelevant stimulation, as in the “cocktail party effect”... ...we cannot say what attributes make specific artworks so exquisitely attuned to an individual’s unique makeup. And yet this hypothesis provides a coherent explanation of our data in that it is consistent not only with what we know about the DMN, but also with what we know about art.
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Note that the “resonance” between certain artworks and observers’ sense of self that, we propose, occurs during intense aesthetic experience, is different from explicitly self-referential emotions such as pride, shame, guilt and embarrassment, as these involve an appraisal of self-responsibility for an event. It is also interesting to note in this context that intense aesthetic experience can sometimes be thrillingly bidirectional: not only does the perceiver feel as if they understand the artwork, but there is a sense that the artwork “understands” the perceiver, expressing one’s own innermost thoughts, feelings, or values. The latter sense points to the possibility that it is the artist, not the artwork, who has understood something deep about the perceiver’s experience; hence the intensely personal connection felt by many people toward favorite artists who are, after all, strangers to them. In some cases, this bidirectionality is accompanied by a perceived or real congruence with the intentions of the artist. Thus, unlike in self-referential emotions, in aesthetic experience the relation to others is not focused on appraisal but on a sense of understanding, gained insight and meaning. The extraction of meaning has been suggested previously as a primary factor of aesthetic experience. But, while those authors suggest that an appeal to self-related information is but one way in which viewers extract meaning from artwork, the release of the DMN from suppression on only the trials rated “4” suggests that, in fact, self-relevance is an integral aspect of intensely moving aesthetic experience.
Giacomo Bignardi, Dirk J. A. Smit, Edward A. Vessel, MacKenzie D. Trupp, Luca F. Ticini, Simon E. Fisher, & Tinca J. C. Polderman
Genetic effects on variability in visual aesthetic evaluations are partially shared across visual domains
(2024)
[1 (abstract)]... Results indicate that the heritability of major dimensions of aesthetic evaluations is comparable to that of other complex social traits, albeit lower than for other complex cognitive traits. The exception was taste-typicality for abstract images, for which we found only shared and unique environmental influences. ...
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... One such emerging principle indicates that interindividual differences in aesthetic evaluations are the norm rather than the exception. People tend to display different aesthetic sensitivity towards features of the stimuli being evaluated, and differ in the extent to which they are open to, and derive pleasure from, aesthetically rewarding experiences. Further, people show a great degree of variation in individual taste, even for stimuli for which aesthetic evaluations are mostly agreed upon, such as faces.
... Many studies suggest that aesthetic value is formed and shaped by prior experiences in individuals, groups and societies. However, complementary evidence challenges the idea that the environment alone is the only source of variation. For example, evidence from behavioural genetic studies shows that genetic predispositions make substantial contributions to variation in attitudes, interests and engagement toward music and arts, proneness to instances of aesthetic experiences, such as aesthetic chills, and even major dimensions of cultural taste and participation.
Yet, little is known about the extent to which genetic variation contributes to what makes subjective aesthetic evaluations differ between individuals. ...
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...our analyses revealed that aesthetic evaluations for abstract images, scenes and faces consistently elicited a diversified range of reliable individual preferences. Individuals expressed the most dissimilar (idiosyncratic) preferences for abstract images, intermediate similarity for faces, and most similar (shared) preferences for scenes.
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[8]Discussion
... On the one hand, we found that genetic influences have small effects on which visual images people prefer, as genetically related individuals tend to display only slightly more similar ratings of images than unrelated individuals, regardless of the evaluated visual domain. These results strengthen earlier claims that environmental influences are a source of variation in aesthetic preferences for faces and extend such claims to previously not investigated visual domains such as abstract images and scenes. On the other hand, we show that variability in taste-typicality (how similar individuals’ preferences are to the group preferences) and evaluation-bias (the overall aesthetic value evoked by visual images) are substantially influenced by genetic effects. In contrast to the aesthetic agreement between individuals (the pairwise similarity between individuals’ preferences), these two metrics represent more foundational measures of aesthetic evaluations and how they systematically vary inter-individually. These latter results challenge the traditional view that environmental experiences alone shape inter-individual differences in the formation of aesthetic value across various visual domains.
...we found that aesthetic agreement and taste-typicality are not equivalent measures for individual preferences. Our work indicates that metrics that quantify how typical individuals’ aesthetic evaluations are compared to the group average hold only a small amount of information about the etiology of actual preferences within a pair, for any domain. From an analytical point of view,... this stems from the observation that two individuals might display similar taste-typicality scores and yet strongly disagree on their aesthetic preferences. ...
...we speculate that the differences between aesthetic agreement and taste-typicality could also be, in part, reconceptualised as reflecting individual differences in arbitrary specific states versus more general systematic traits. From both theoretical and empirical work, we know that aesthetic preferences can be context dependent and vary over time. Yet, we also know that individuals vary systematically in the way they aesthetically evaluate sensory stimuli. Within these frameworks, aesthetic
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agreement and hence aesthetic preferences for a set of sampled images, would thus partially represent a shared state of preferences between pairs of individuals, while taste-typicality (as well as evaluation bias) would represent a more stable individual trait, less bounded by the actual sample of images and evoked states. This view aligns with previous work suggesting taste-typicality systematically correlates across sensory modalities and with the current moderate correlation within sensory modality across different visual domains. Moreover, under such a framework, we would expect aesthetic agreement to show lower repeatability over larger periods of time than taste-typicality, a trend that we start to observe in the third independent and unrelated sample,... Nevertheless, we note that more research is needed...
...we also found that shared environmental effects (C) on inter-individual differences in fundamental metrics of aesthetic value, if present, are small to negligible, except for taste-typicality for abstract images. It is known that mere exposure to, associations with, and self-relevance of visual objects correlates with their perceived aesthetic value. As such, given that twins are exposed to similar environments and thus are expected to be exposed to more similar visual sensory stimulation over a lifetime, the finding that models with purely additive genetic and unique environmental sources of differences can mostly explain variability in taste-typicality and evaluation-bias might seem counter-intuitive. Yet this finding falls well under the second law of behavioural genetics, which states that the “effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes”, at least for within-group variability, and the empirical support for it over many other quantitative traits. Moreover, it is also possible that as for other cognitive traits, such as general intelligence, shared environmental effects over aesthetic value formation matter most while the environment is shared and within certain developmental windows, with a gradual decrease into adulthood (generally known as the Wilson effect). ...
Nonetheless, we found evidence of shared environmental influences on variation in taste-typically for abstract images, representing a clear violation of the second law of behavioural genetics. This exceptional finding bears on the important question of how aesthetic processes may differ for biological (natural) versus artefactual (non-natural) categories of objects...and how effects within families can influence individuals differently across domains. We note that, as previously suggested by the literature, individuals tend to show a high degree of aesthetic agreement for images of faces and natural landscapes, both of which are natural kinds, but much less for abstract images. Our finding of a behavioural trait in an adult sample in which individual differences appear to be purely influenced by environmental factors, both shared and unique (i.e., taste-typicality for abstract images), raises the question of whether aesthetic processes underlying the evaluation of other humanmade artefactual objects, such as visual art and music, are free from genetic predispositions. Recently, it has been proposed that inferential processes about the sensory world, both perceptual and aesthetic, can be understood as falling between two extremes; one (inferential processes about natural kinds) being constrained by genetic predispositions, while the other (inferential processes about non-natural kinds) is mainly shaped by environmental exposure. Under this framework, aesthetic value derived from natural images is more constrained by a priori predispositions than the value that is derived from images belonging outside natural categories. Our findings may provide partial support for this hypothesis, in that there was a robust genetic correlation between taste-typicality for scenes and faces, but an absence of evidence for genetic effects on variation in taste-typicality for abstract images. However, in addition to previous literature indicating that variability in perceptual processes, more than aesthetic processes, correlates mostly with genetic differences amongst individuals, the magnitudes of effects in our results indicate smaller genetic constraints than those originally hypothesised to influence variation in the aesthetic evaluation of
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natural kinds. If such constraints do exist and are captured by the genetic components found in this study, they contribute to less than half the variability in the major axis of inter-individual variation in aesthetic value. This leaves unsystematic and environmental sources (rather than systematic genetic ones) as the leading source of differences in aesthetic evaluation, even for images that belong to natural categories.
Edward A. Vessel, Jonathan Stahl, Natalia Maurer, Alexander Denker, G. Gabrielle Starr
Personalized Visual Aesthetics
(2014)
1. INTRODUCTION ...
Although it is often expressed that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, e.g. that aesthetic preferences for visual experiences are personal and subjective, much of the empirical work seeking to explain the basis for preference formation has focused on identifying objective features of a stimulus set that predict higher preference across all observers. Indeed, the success of the advertising, cosmetics and product design industries would suggest that there is, at least in some cases, a strong shared component for preferences of visual material. ...
Yes [yet??] the focus on average preferences left unanswered a critical question – is the visual appeal of a stimulus primarily determined by such objectively measurable properties of an image? ...
An alternative hypothesis is that internal, subjective factors such as meaning (semantic associations) are the proximal determinants of aesthetic preferences, and that the observed agreement across individuals for real-world scenes is a consequence of the fact that such images evoke commonly held semantic interpretations across a population. ...
... In the absence of such commonly-shared semantic associations, preferences for abstract images were highly individual [in Vessel & Rubin(2010)]. ...
Highly individual preferences can emerge not only for abstract images devoid of recognizable objects, but in other contexts that de-emphasize semantic content as well. ...an fMRI study by Vessel, Starr & Rubin (2012) found that observers asked to view images of two-dimensional visual artwork (paintings) and rate the degree to which they were aesthetically “moved” on a 4-point scale showed almost no agreement across observers..., despite the predominance of representational artworks in the stimulus set and individuals’ strong convictions about which paintings they found to be personally moving.
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2. METHODS
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3. RESULTS
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4. DISCUSSION Across the set of experiments, there are striking differences in the degree to which different observers tend to like the same images... Agreement for artworks is very low, while agreement on the set of faces (considered as a whole), is very high. Agreement for landscapes is also quite high, whereas agreement for architecture is much lower, more similar to that observed for artwork.
The results for artwork - very low agreement amongst different people coupled with strong reliability for individual observers, provides additional evidence that preferences are not universally determined by specific visual features, but rather on the basis of subjective associations. This is true even for representational artworks containing depictions of recognizable objects and settings. ...
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Out of all the categories, preferences for faces are were the most similar across individuals. In addition, agreement for faces was modulated by the gender of the stimulus, with opposite gender stimuli (for heterosexual males) showing higher agreement, despite similar mean ratings for the two genders. This suggests that the facial features that influenced heterosexual males’ judgments of female attractiveness were highly conserved across individuals, whereas assessments of same-gender attractiveness for heterosexual males reflected more individual tastes. ...
Taken together, these results suggest that preferences for categories of stimuli that are important from a standpoint of evolutionary fitness, such as landscapes and faces, come to rely on similar information across people, whereas aesthetic appreciation for architecture and artwork (artifacts of human culture) rely on more individual aesthetic sensibilities. Interpreted another way, this may provide a theoretical framework for understanding when and how a visual stimulus will be evaluated in an “aesthetic” context - the absence of behavioral relevance or compelling biological drive leaves an individual free to form an aesthetic preference on the basis of features that are personally salient, but not necessarily the same across people.
Edward A. Vessel, Nava Rubin
Beauty and the beholder: Highly individual taste for abstract, but not real-world images
(2010)
[1 (abstract)]
At the individual observer level both abstract and real-world images yielded robust and consistent visual preferences, and yet abstract images yielded much lower across observer agreement in preferences than did real-world images. This suggests that visual preferences are typically driven by the semantic content of stimuli, and that shared semantic interpretations then lead to shared preferences. Further experiments showed that highly individual preferences can nevertheless emerge also for real-world scenes, in contexts which de-emphasize their semantic associations.
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Introduction
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The tendency to average results across observers, stressing group norms over the expression of individual taste, deemphasizes the potential role that factors internal to the observer may have on preference. An alternative approach posits that the relation between preferences and stimulus attributes, when present, may be indirectly mediated via latent variables. According to this hypothesis, the proximal determinants of preferences are internal factors reflecting subjective, and therefore inherently individual, evaluations. This approach does not deny the existence of general principles underlying preference formation—however, such principles are hypothesized to exist at an internal process level, leaving room for individual differences. Any common preferences observed across individuals would be the result of common experiences with a stimulus, not stimulus attributes per se.
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An emphasis on the internal aspects of preference formation requires the use of methods that allow the experimenter to relate individuals’ preferences to putative subjective, internal factors. And yet, many of the tests of the theories above have relied on designs requiring the averaging of data over observers... In this paper, we focus on measuring agreement across observers, which allows for an assessment of the relative contributions to preference of individual versus common factors.
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Results
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Experiment 1
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Until now there was no direct evidence that the visual preferences are indeed mediated by such semantic associations. Instead, one might have hypothesized that there are systematic differences in the colors, shapes or textures of scenes related to “good” and “bad” semantic knowledge, and that the high agreement in preferences across observers is driven directly by those putative visual differences, rather than being mediated indirectly by the semantic associations the images invoke. This alternative hypothesis is ruled out by our finding that the agreement between observers drops dramatically when they form preferences about abstract images, since those images also contained a wide range of colors, shapes and textures, yet did not lead to high preference agreement. The purpose of
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including abstract images from six different categories was to span as wide a range of preference as possible with the set of 96 images. An analysis by category revealed no consistent effect of abstract image category on across-observer agreement. However, it is possible that the small number of images in each category limited our ability to observe such an effect.
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[8]Discussion
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Our results... show that the major effect of increasing semantic associations is not to universally increase preference, but instead to increase the degree to which different observers agree in which images are liked or disliked.
An unexpected finding of Experiment 2 was that, when real-world images are intermixed such that they are compared directly with abstract images, between-observer agreement about visual preference of those images is significantly decreased... A reasonable scenario is that during the real-world scene session of Experiment 1, observers could allow associated meanings to inform their preference choices (either intentionally or unconsciously), since all images contained such meaning. In contrast, in Experiment 2 two different image categories were intermixed, which forced observers to make direct comparisons between an abstract image and a real-world scene on approximately half of the trials. In this situation, relying on meaning to make preference choices would make the task more difficult, since this dimension was not present for many of the stimuli. Therefore, a reasonable strategy would be for the observers to de-emphasize this dimension of meaning—a strategy which affected even the one-quarter of comparisons where both stimuli had readily available semantic interpretations. Thus, we propose that in the ‘intermixed’ condition observers made much less use of semantic information when making their preference judgments in all trials (and not just the trials that contained abstract images), and instead based their decisions more on the visual aspects of the images.
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The strikingly low agreement for abstract images found in our experiments argues strongly against the idea that objective visual features play a major role in directly determining preference, as hypothesized by Berlyne (1971). Instead, our findings provide support to theories that postulate that internal factors drive preference and that when stimulus features play a role it is via the mediating role of meaning...
Although our findings suggest that the presence of semantic information is heavily weighted in determining preferences, it should be noted that preference is not a monotonic function of “meaningfulness”—a finding which is contrary to Martindale’s hypothesis (Martindale, 1984). Rather, the semantics of an image can induce either high or low preference. In Experiment 1, the high agreement was driven by low preference images as much as by high preference images, and in Experiment 2, there were real-world scenes that were overall less preferred than many of the abstract images. These findings are a better fit with the neurocomputational hypothesis of Biederman and Vessel (2006), which suggests a strong influence of associative activity.
Major theories of emotion recognize the central role that evaluation of an event’s pleasantness play in determining one’s emotional response (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). Our results are in line with a view of preference as a “knowledge-based” emotion such as interest and curiosity, and may be understood as resulting from a series of appraisals of an event (Silvia, 2005a, 2005b). But, in the narrower context of our forced-choice paradigm, preference could also be thought of as the process of collapsing a multi-dimensional emotional space onto a scalar axis, to allow choice between the widely different options the environment offers for action, attention and consumption. Our stimulus set was purposefully selected to include a fairly narrow range of emotional reactions and did not include strongly arousing images such as gore or sexual content. Thus, although our results show consistency and a robust range of preferences, the experiments reported here highlight the fact that
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the same stimulus can lead to different emotional reactions in different observers, which may well be caused by individual differences in the appraised meaning, novelty, or coping potential of a perceptual event. It should also be noted, though, that our experimental stimuli were not designed (and are not well suited) to explore the relationships between preference and emotion in general.
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