Expertise and Aesthetic Liking

Abstract

It has long been observed that experience influences aesthetic evaluations. Psychological research has found multiple examples of experts and nonexperts forming different liking responses to similar stimuli. It remains unclear, though, precisely why experts evaluate objects they are experts on differently from people who are not experts. In the article under discussion, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors demonstrated that, compared to non-architects, architects exhibited higher levels of neural activity in the reward systems when tasked with evaluating their liking of buildings but not when tasked with evaluating the attractiveness of faces.