Toward a Computational Understanding of Neuroaesthetics

Among the most challenging questions in the field of neuroaesthetics concerns how a piece of art comes to be liked in the first place. That is, how can the brain rapidly process a stimulus to form an aesthetic judgment even for stimuli never before encountered? In the article under discussion in this chapter, by leveraging computational methods in combination with behavioral and neuroimaging experiments the authors show that the brain does this by breaking a visual stimulus down into underlying features or attributes. These features are shared across objects, and weights over these features are integrated over to produce aesthetic judgments. This process is structured hierarchically in which elementary statistical properties of an image are combined to generate higher level features which in turn yield aesthetic value. Neuroimaging supports the implementation of this hierarchical integration along a gradient from early to higher order visual cortex extending into association cortex and ultimately converging in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex.