Beauty in the brain: The neural organisation of Aesthetics

The proposed project uses approaches from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, with insights from Economics and Aesthetics, to examine the neural organisation of aesthetic experience. Humans appreciate beauty. Appreciation for beauty is not only a fundamental feature of the human condition, but also a factor that influences our choices. We often go out of our way to surround ourselves with aesthetically pleasing environments and adorn our bodies with beautiful objects. It is therefore vital to study how these aesthetic experiences are organised in our minds.
Rational choice theory (RCT) is an economic framework which outlines rational decision-making as a process which produces the best outcome after weighing costs and benefits. Accordingly, there are two opposing possibilities for how beauty is processed and organised in the brain: Beauty/aesthetics is 'rational', or it is 'irrational' in terms of RCT. We will test these alternatives in a series of electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments designed to uncover the underlying mechanisms. Specifically, we will use behavioural and neural measures to
a) determine if beauty is rational. If so, it should exhibit traits predicted by RCT, such as transitivity (if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred over C). Preliminary data from our lab has shown that transitivity is exhibited for arbitrary choices made on fractal images, which is reflected in early neural signatures (e.g., an EEG component known as N2pc). Using these techniques, we will also address the debate on whether aesthetic processing arises early or late in the cortex.
b) map the dimensions along which beauty is organised in the brain. We will evaluate, for example, the contributions of various external (e.g., stimulus properties such as complexity) and internal (pleasure elicited by the object) attributes.
c) identify cortical localization of EEG activity during viewing and preference judgements by examining power changes in targeted (alpha & gamma) frequency bands.
These results will be analysed in the light of cognitive models of aesthetics (e.g., Vienna Aesthetic model) to assess the rationality and neural organisation of beauty.