Pictograph Portrays What It Is

Abstract

As one origin of Chinese characters, pictograph has a graphical structure based on its referent. Are the aesthetic qualities of the reference objects reflected in the neural processing of pictographs? In the study reviewed in this chapter, participants were scanned while making aesthetic judgments of pictographs and their referents. The conjunction analysis revealed the common involvement of the bilateral inferior occipital gyri and inferior frontal gyri, the right superior occipital gyrus, the left middle occipital gyrus, and the inferior orbitofrontal cortex for the aesthetic judgments of pictographs and object images referring to beautiful objects. Moreover, only the beautiful judgments for pictographs but not object images activated the motor areas, implying that an approach motivation was elicited during the aesthetic perception of novel pictographs. Results indicate that not only the object images, but also the corresponding pictographs arouse a sense of beauty that relies on common neural mechanisms during aesthetic judgments.