Influence of aesthetic perception on visual event-related potentials

Yes or no? A study of ErrPs in the "guess what I am thinking" paradigm with stimuli of different visual content

Error-related potentials (ErrPs) have attracted attention in part because of their practical potential for building brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigms. BCIs, facilitating direct communication between the brain and machines, hold great promise for brain-AI interaction. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of ErrPs is crucial to ensure reliable BCI outcomes. In this study, we investigated ErrPs in the context of the "guess what I am thinking" paradigm. 23 healthy participants were instructed to imagine an object from a predetermined set, while an algorithm randomly selected another object that was either the same as or different from the imagined object. We recorded and analyzed the participants' EEG activity to capture their mental responses to the algorithm's "predictions". The study identified components distinguishing correct from incorrect responses. It discusses their nature and how they differ from ErrPs extensively studied in other BCI paradigms. We observed pronounced variations in the shape of ErrPs across different stimulus sets, underscoring the significant influence of visual stimulus appearance on ErrP peaks. These findings have implications for designing effective BCI systems, especially considering the less conventional BCI paradigm employed. They emphasize the necessity of accounting for stimulus factors in BCI development.

Exploring Aesthetic Perception in Impaired Aging: A Multimodal Brain-Computer Interface Study

In the field of neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are used to connect the human brain with external devices, providing insights into the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes, including aesthetic perception. Non-invasive BCIs, such as EEG and fNIRS, are critical for studying central nervous system activity and understanding how individuals with cognitive deficits process and respond to aesthetic stimuli. This study assessed twenty participants who were divided into control and impaired aging (AI) groups based on MMSE scores. EEG and fNIRS were used to measure their neurophysiological responses to aesthetic stimuli that varied in pleasantness and dynamism. Significant differences were identified between the groups in P300 amplitude and late positive potential (LPP), with controls showing greater reactivity. AI subjects showed an increase in oxyhemoglobin in response to pleasurable stimuli, suggesting hemodynamic compensation. This study highlights the effectiveness of multimodal BCIs in identifying the neural basis of aesthetic appreciation and impaired aging. Despite its limitations, such as sample size and the subjective nature of aesthetic appreciation, this research lays the groundwork for cognitive rehabilitation tailored to aesthetic perception, improving the comprehension of cognitive disorders through integrated BCI methodologies.

The implicit preference evaluation for the ceramic tiles with different visual features: Evidence from an event-related potential study

Background

Ceramic tiles are popular because of their various forms, and they are often used to decorate the environment. However, few studies have applied objective methods to explore the implicit preference and visual attention of people toward ceramic tile features. Using event-related potential technology can provide neurophysiological evidence for the study and applications of tiles.

Materials and methods

This study explored the influence of pattern, lightness, and color system factors of ceramic tiles on the preferences of people using a combination of subjective questionnaires and event-related potential (ERP) technology. Twelve different conditions of tiles (2 × 3 × 2) were used as stimuli. EEG data were collected from 20 participants while they watched the stimuli. Subjective preference scores and average ERPs were analyzed using analysis of variance and correlation analysis.

Results

(1) Pattern, lightness, and color system factors significantly affected the subjective preference scores for tiles; the unpatterned tiles, light-toned tiles, and warm-colored tiles received higher preference scores. (2) The preferences of people for different features of tiles moderated ERP amplitudes. (3) The light-toned tiles with a high preference score caused a greater N100 amplitude than the medium-toned and dark-toned tiles; and the patterned tiles and warm-colored tiles with low preference scores induced greater P200 and N200 amplitudes.

Discussion

In the early stage of visual processing, light-toned tiles attracted more attention, possibly because of the positive emotional effects related to the preference. The greater P200 and N200 elicited by the patterned and neutral-colored tiles in the middle stage of visual processing indicates that patterned and neutral-colored tiles attracted more attention. This may be due to negativity bias, where more attention is allocated to negative stimuli that people strongly dislike. From the perspective of cognitive processes, the results indicate that the lightness of ceramic tiles is the factor that people first detect, and the visual processing of pattern and color system factors of ceramic tiles belong to a higher level of visual processing. This study provides a new perspective and relevant information for assessing the visual characteristics of tiles for environmental designers and marketers involved in the ceramic tiles industry.

The relationship between aesthetic preferences of people for ceramic tile design and neural responses: An event-related potential study

Introduction

The aesthetic preferences of people can determine the success of a design and are often closely related to design features. The discovery of designs that match user preferences can provide a reference for designers. Ceramic tiles are widely used in environmental design; however, little attention has been paid to the aesthetic preferences of people for tiles. This study aimed to explore the relationship between aesthetic preferences for tile design and neural responses.

Materials and methods

In this study, two groups of tiles with different preference levels were randomly presented to 16 participants, and their electroencephalograms were recorded. The mean amplitudes of event-related potentials were analyzed by ANOVA.

Results

The results showed that: (1) the aesthetic preferences of people for tiles could modulate brain activity; (2) tiles that people liked triggered higher N100 amplitudes; and (3) tiles that people disliked triggered higher P200 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes.

Discussion

These results suggest that N100, P200, and LPP are significantly related to the aesthetic preferences of people for ceramic tiles. The difference in N100 and P200 amplitudes indicates that participants developed aesthetic perceptions of the tiles in the early and middle stages of vision and formed different attention allocations to tiles with varying levels of aesthetic preference; in the middle and late stages of visual processing, the difference in the LPP amplitude indicates that the impression of people for tiles is further deepened in the later stage, forming a top-down emotion-driven evaluation. Exploring the relationship between the aesthetic preferences of people and neural responses is significant in establishing objective aesthetic judgment indicators for tiles and understanding the process of aesthetic cognition. This study provides relevant information for quantitative aesthetic assessments of environmental design, interior design, and marketing involving ceramic tiles.

Do we enjoy what we sense and perceive? A dissociation between aesthetic appreciation and basic perception of environmental objects or events

This integrative review rearticulates the notion of human aesthetics by critically appraising the conventional definitions, offerring a new, more comprehensive definition, and identifying the fundamental components associated with it. It intends to advance holistic understanding of the notion by differentiating aesthetic perception from basic perceptual recognition, and by characterizing these concepts from the perspective of information processing in both visual and nonvisual modalities. To this end, we analyze the dissociative nature of information processing in the brain, introducing a novel local-global integrative model that differentiates aesthetic processing from basic perceptual processing. This model builds on the current state of the art in visual aesthetics as well as newer propositions about nonvisual aesthetics. This model comprises two analytic channels: aesthetics-only channel and perception-to-aesthetics channel. The aesthetics-only channel primarily involves restricted local processing for quality or richness (e.g., attractiveness, beauty/prettiness, elegance, sublimeness, catchiness, hedonic value) analysis, whereas the perception-to-aesthetics channel involves global/extended local processing for basic feature analysis, followed by restricted local processing for quality or richness analysis. We contend that aesthetic processing operates independently of basic perceptual processing, but not independently of cognitive processing. We further conjecture that there might be a common faculty, labeled as aesthetic cognition faculty, in the human brain for all sensory aesthetics albeit other parts of the brain can also be activated because of basic sensory processing prior to aesthetic processing, particularly during the operation of the second channel. This generalized model can account not only for simple and pure aesthetic experiences but for partial and complex aesthetic experiences as well.

Characterizing Dynamic Neural Representations of Scene Attractiveness

Aesthetic experiences during natural vision are varied: They can arise from viewing scenic landscapes, interesting architecture, or attractive people. Recent research in the field of neuroaesthetics has taught us a lot about where in the brain such aesthetic experiences are represented. Much less is known about when such experiences arise during the cortical processing cascade. Particularly, the dynamic neural representation of perceived attractiveness for rich natural scenes is not well understood. Here, I present data from an EEG experiment, in which participants provided attractiveness judgments for a set of diverse natural scenes. Using multivariate pattern analysis, I demonstrate that scene attractiveness is mirrored in early brain signals that arise within 200 msec of vision, suggesting that the aesthetic appeal of scenes is first resolved during perceptual processing. In more detailed analyses, I show that even such early neural correlates of scene attractiveness are partly related to interindividual variation in aesthetic preferences and that they generalize across scene contents. Together, these results characterize the time-resolved neural dynamics that give rise to aesthetic experiences in complex natural environments.

On the Neuronal Dynamics of Aesthetic Experience: Evidence from Electroencephalographic Oscillatory Dynamics

Aesthetic experiences have an influence on many aspects of life. Interest in the neural basis of aesthetic experiences has grown rapidly in the past decade, and fMRI studies have identified several brain systems supporting aesthetic experiences. Work on the rapid neuronal dynamics of aesthetic experience, however, is relatively scarce. This study adds to this field by investigating the experience of being aesthetically moved by means of ERP and time-frequency analysis. Participants' electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while they viewed a diverse set of artworks and evaluated the extent to which these artworks moved them. Results show that being aesthetically moved is associated with a sustained increase in gamma activity over centroparietal regions. In addition, alpha power over right frontocentral regions was reduced in high- and low-moving images, compared to artworks given intermediate ratings. We interpret the gamma effect as an indication for sustained savoring processes for aesthetically moving artworks compared to aesthetically less-moving artworks. The alpha effect is interpreted as an indication of increased attention for aesthetically salient images. In contrast to previous works, we observed no significant effects in any of the established ERP components, but we did observe effects at latencies longer than 1 sec. We conclude that EEG time-frequency analysis provides useful information on the neuronal dynamics of aesthetic experience.

The Implicit Aesthetic Preference for Mobile Marketing Interface Layout-An ERP Study

Businesses and scholars have been trying to improve marketing effect by optimizing mobile marketing interfaces aesthetically as users browse freely and aimlessly through mobile marketing interfaces. Although the layout is an important design factor that affects interface aesthetics, whether it can trigger customer's aesthetic preferences in mobile marketing remains unexplored. To address this issue, we employ an empirical methodology of event-related potentials (EPR) in this study from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Subjects are presented with a series of mobile marketing interface images of different layouts with identical marketing content. Their EEG waves were recorded as they were required to distinguish a target stimulus from the others. After the experiment, each of the subjects chose five stimuli interfaces they like and five they dislike. By analyzing the ERP data derived from the EEG data and the behavioral data, we find significant differences between the disliked interfaces and the other interfaces in the ERP component of P2 from the frontal-central area in the 200–400 ms post-stimulus onset time window and LPP from both the frontal-central and parietal-occipital area in the 400–600 ms time window. The results support the hypothesis that humans do make rapid implicit aesthetic preferences for interface layouts and suggest that even under a free browsing context like the mobile marketing context, interface layouts that raise high emotional arousal can still attract more user attention and induce users' implicit aesthetic preference.

Effects of Design Aesthetics on the Perceived Value of a Product

Design aesthetics play a crucial role in product design. Stakeholders expect to develop highly valuable premium products by improving the design aesthetics of products. Nevertheless, the question of how to evaluate the value of design aesthetics has not been fully addressed. In this study, the effects of design aesthetics on the evaluation of the value of a product were investigated through a strictly controlled experiment in which the neural responses of the participants were measured. Forty participants completed the design aesthetics experiment in a laboratory setting. Images of products were divided into two categories: those representing high- and low-design-aesthetic stimuli. Both types of images were labeled with the same price. Overall, the images representing high design aesthetics elicited smaller N100 and lower P200 amplitudes than did the images representing low design aesthetics. This finding indicates that low design aesthetics attracted more attention than high design aesthetics did and that high design aesthetics triggered positive emotions. Low-design-aesthetic products elicited a larger N400 amplitude. This finding reveals the inconsistency between labeled and expected prices. The present study indicates that the N400 component can be used as an indicator for measuring the perceived value of a product in a future product design study. Our study provides event-related potential indicators that can be easily applied in decision making for measuring the perceived value of a product's design.

The Cognitive-Emotional Design and Study of Architectural Space: A Scoping Review of Neuroarchitecture and Its Precursor Approaches

Humans respond cognitively and emotionally to the built environment. The modern possibility of recording the neural activity of subjects during exposure to environmental situations, using neuroscientific techniques and virtual reality, provides a promising framework for future design and studies of the built environment. The discipline derived is termed "neuroarchitecture". Given neuroarchitecture's transdisciplinary nature, it progresses needs to be reviewed in a contextualised way, together with its precursor approaches. The present article presents a scoping review, which maps out the broad areas on which the new discipline is based. The limitations, controversies, benefits, impact on the professional sectors involved, and potential of neuroarchitecture and its precursors' approaches are critically addressed.

"Stopping for knowledge": The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle

According to a millennial-old philosophical debate, aesthetic emotions have been connected to knowledge acquisition. Recent scientific evidence, collected across different disciplinary domains, confirms this link, but also reveals that motor inhibition plays a crucial role in the process. In this review, we discuss multidisciplinary results and propose an original account of aesthetic appreciation (the stopping for knowledge hypothesis) framed within the predictive coding theory. We discuss evidence showing that aesthetic emotions emerge in correspondence with an inhibition of motor behavior (i.e., minimizing action), promoting a simultaneous perceptual processing enhancement, at the level of sensory cortices (i.e., optimizing learning). Accordingly, we suggest that aesthetic appreciation may represent a hedonic feedback over learning progresses, motivating the individual to inhibit motor routines to seek further knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, the neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies we review reveal the presence of a strong association between aesthetic appreciation and the activation of the dopaminergic reward-related circuits. Finally, we propose a number of possible applications of the stopping for knowledge hypothesis in the clinical and education domains.

Aesthetic appreciation of musical intervals enhances behavioural and neurophysiological indexes of attentional engagement and motor inhibition

From Kant to current perspectives in neuroaesthetics, the experience of beauty has been described as disinterested, i.e. focusing on the stimulus perceptual features while neglecting self-referred concerns. At a neurophysiological level, some indirect evidence suggests that disinterested aesthetic appreciation might be associated with attentional enhancement and inhibition of motor behaviour. To test this hypothesis, we performed three auditory-evoked potential experiments, employing consonant and dissonant two-note musical intervals. Twenty-two volunteers judged the beauty of intervals (Aesthetic Judgement task) or responded to them as fast as possible (Detection task). In a third Go-NoGo task, a different group of twenty-two participants had to refrain from responding when hearing intervals. Individual aesthetic judgements positively correlated with response times in the Detection task, with slower motor responses for more appreciated intervals. Electrophysiological indexes of attentional engagement (N1/P2) and motor inhibition (N2/P3) were enhanced for more appreciated intervals. These findings represent the first experimental evidence confirming the disinterested interest hypothesis and may have important applications in research areas studying the effects of stimulus features on learning and motor behaviour.

Applying Event-Related Potentials to Measure Perceptual Experience toward the Navigation Interface of a Mobile Game for Improving the Design

High-level user experience has become the key factor that one game can be successful in the game market. The home page of mobile games, especially the design of the navigation interface, has a significant impact on users’ initial experience, which is an important determent to users’ preferences and purchase decision. Hence, measuring users’ perceptual experiences of the navigation interface can help designers understand real demands from users. Previous studies primarily used self-report scales or interviews to measure gamers’ perceptual experiences. However, it may not reflect gamers’ real perceptions that they are feeling as most of time the feeling is short-lived and implicit. To fill this gap, the current study attempted to combine subjective evaluation with event-related potentials (ERP) to objectively measure gamers’ perceptual experience evoked by the navigation interface of the mobile game. The navigation interfaces of mobile games with low, medium, and high perceptual experience were developed and the ERP experiment was conducted to detect the differences in users’ electroencephalograph (EEG) components when subjects were exposed to the different design levels of navigation interface. The results showed that N1 reaction showed asymmetry in brain regions, and P2 and N2 showed symmetry, and relative to the navigation interface with low and medium perceptual experiences, the high level of navigation interface induced a larger amplitude of N2 in the anterior scalp and P2 in the frontal scalp. These EEG components can, therefore, be regarded as significant indicators reflecting gamers’ perceptions of the navigation interface. The findings benefit game companies of navigation interface designs.

Dynamics of aesthetic experience are reflected in the default-mode network

Neuroaesthetics is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field of research that aims to understand the neural substrates of aesthetic experience: While understanding aesthetic experience has been an objective of philosophers for centuries, it has only more recently been embraced by neuroscientists. Recent work in neuroaesthetics has revealed that aesthetic experience with static visual art engages visual, reward and default-mode networks. Very little is known about the temporal dynamics of these networks during aesthetic appreciation. Previous behavioral and brain imaging research suggests that critical aspects of aesthetic experience have slow dynamics, taking more than a few seconds, making them amenable to study with fMRI. Here, we identified key aspects of the dynamics of aesthetic experience while viewing art for various durations. In the first few seconds following image onset, activity in the DMN (and high-level visual and reward regions) was greater for very pleasing images; in the DMN this activity counteracted a suppressive effect that grew longer and deeper with increasing image duration. In addition, for very pleasing art, the DMN response returned to baseline in a manner time-locked to image offset. Conversely, for non-pleasing art, the timing of this return to baseline was inconsistent. This differential response in the DMN may therefore reflect the internal dynamics of the participant's state: The participant disengages from art-related processing and returns to stimulus-independent thought. These dynamics suggest that the DMN tracks the internal state of a participant during aesthetic experience.

Emotional Responses to Visual Art and Commercial Stimuli: Implications for Creativity and Aesthetics

There is an ongoing debate about whether emotional responses to artworks are similar to those produced by the commercial stimuli experienced in everyday life. In this study, we evaluated the emotional responses to the visual art and commercial stimuli by using electroencephalography (EEG) to obtain an objective measure of emotional responses of the brain, namely the frontal alpha asymmetry. Positive frontal alpha asymmetry suggests positive emotional responses, and vice versa. The visual art stimuli consisted of 80 artistic and naturally colored paintings whereas the commercial stimuli consisted of 80 different window displays of fashion collections. The results revealed that positive frontal alpha asymmetry was elicited when the participants judged the visual art stimuli as either beautiful or not beautiful. For the commercial stimuli, positive frontal alpha asymmetry was observed when they were considered as beautiful, whereas negative frontal alpha asymmetry was exhibited toward those perceived as not beautiful. These findings suggest more positive emotional responses to the visual art stimuli, regardless of their aesthetics. However, favorable emotional responses were only elicited toward the commercial stimuli regarded as beautiful. The implications for the creative and aesthetic design of the commercial stimuli in Chinese society in influencing consumers’ emotional responses are discussed.

Electrophysiological correlates of aesthetic processing of webpages: a comparison of experts and laypersons

We investigated whether design experts or laypersons evaluate webpages differently. Twenty participants, 10 experts and 10 laypersons, judged the aesthetic value of a webpage in an EEG-experiment. Screenshots of 150 webpages, judged as aesthetic or as unaesthetic by another 136 participants, served as stimulus material. Behaviorally, experts and laypersons evaluated unaesthetic webpages similarly, but they differed in their evaluation of aesthetic ones: experts evaluated aesthetic webpages as unaesthetic more often than laypersons did. The ERP-data show main effects of level of expertise and of aesthetic value only. There was no interaction of expertise and aesthetics. In a time-window of 110–130 ms after stimulus onset, aesthetic webpages elicited a more negative EEG-amplitude than unaesthetic webpages. In the same time window, experts had more negative EEG-amplitudes than laypersons. This patterning of results continued until a time window of 600–800 ms in which group and aesthetic differences diminished. An interaction of perceiver characteristics and object properties that several interactionist theories postulate was absent in the EEG-data. Experts seem to process the stimuli in a more thorough manner than laypersons. The early activation differences between aesthetic and unaesthetic webpages is in contrast with some theories of aesthetic processing and has not been reported before.

Visual Discomfort From Flash Afterimages of Riloid Patterns

Op-art-based stimuli have been shown to be uncomfortable, possibly due to a combination of fixational eye movements (microsaccades) and excessive cortical responses. Efforts have been made to measure illusory phenomena arising from these stimuli in the absence of microsaccades, but there has been no attempt thus far to decouple the effects of the cortical response from the effect of fixational eye movements. This study uses flash afterimages to stabilise the image on the retina and thus reduce the systematic effect of eye movements, in order to investigate the role of the brain in discomfort from op-art-based stimuli. There was a relationship between spatial frequency and the magnitude of the P300 response, showing a similar pattern to that of discomfort judgements, which suggests that there might be a role of discomfort and excessive neural responses independently from the effects of microsaccades.

Testing a novel method for improving wayfinding by means of a P3b Virtual Reality Visual Paradigm in normal aging

BACKGROUND

We propose a virtual reality (VR) model, reproducing a house environment, where color modification of target places, obtainable by home automation in a real ambient, was tested by means of a P3b paradigm. The target place (bathroom door) was designed to be recognized during a virtual wayfinding in a realistic reproduction of a house environment. Different color and luminous conditions, easily obtained in the real ambient from a remote home automation control, were applied to the target and standard places, all the doors being illuminated in white (W), and only target doors colored with a green (G) or red (R) spotlight. Three different Virtual Environments (VE) were depicted, as the bathroom was designed in the aisle (A), living room (L) and bedroom (B). EEG was recorded from 57 scalp electrodes in 10 healthy subjects in the 60-80 year age range (O-old group) and 12 normal cases in the 20-30 year age range (Y-young group).

RESULTS

In Young group, all the target stimuli determined a significant increase in P3b amplitude on the parietal, occipital and central electrodes compared to frequent stimuli condition, whatever was the color of the target door, while in elderly group the P3b obtained by the green and red colors was significantly different from the frequent stimulus, on the parietal, occipital, and central derivations, while the White stimulus did not evoke a significantly larger P3b with respect to frequent stimulus.

DISCUSSION

The modulation of P3b amplitude, obtained by color and luminance change of target place, suggests that cortical resources, able to compensate the age-related progressive loss of cognitive performance, need to be facilitated even in normal elderly. The event-related responses obtained by virtual reality may be a reliable method to test the environmental feasibility to age-related cognitive changes.

Art expertise modulates the emotional response to modern art, especially abstract: an ERP investigation

Art is one of life's great joys, whether it is beautiful, ugly, sublime or shocking. Aesthetic responses to visual art involve sensory, cognitive and visceral processes. Neuroimaging studies have yielded a wealth of information regarding aesthetic appreciation and beauty using visual art as stimuli, but few have considered the effect of expertise on visual and visceral responses. To study the time course of visual, cognitive and emotional processes in response to visual art we investigated the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited whilst viewing and rating the visceral affect of three categories of visual art. Two groups, artists and non-artists viewed representational, abstract and indeterminate 20th century art. Early components, particularly the N1, related to attention and effort, and the P2, linked to higher order visual processing, was enhanced for artists when compared to non-artists. This effect was present for all types of art, but further enhanced for abstract art (AA), which was rated as having lowest visceral affect by the non-artists. The later, slow wave processes (500-1000 ms), associated with arousal and sustained attention, also show clear differences between the two groups in response to both type of art and visceral affect. AA increased arousal and sustained attention in artists, whilst it decreased in non-artists. These results suggest that aesthetic response to visual art is affected by both expertise and semantic content.

The esthetic preference of Chinese typefaces--an event-related potential study

Emotional stimuli such as pictures, logos, geometric shapes, etc can evoke human esthetic preference from previous neuroesthetic studies. Chinese characters can be considered as emotional stimuli as they have an important property: typeface. Intuitively, the emotional meaning of Chinese characters can cause esthetic preference. However, whether a typeface can cause esthetic preference or not from an empirical perspective is still unknown. To address this issue, participants׳ event-related potential (ERP) waves are recorded while they are presented a series of Chinese characters in different typefaces. Participants are asked to distinguish specific target from the others. Afterwards, from the Chinese characters presented in this task, participants are asked individually to select the characters they like the most and dislike the most. By recording the ERP responses (a response of implicit preference to Chinese characters themselves) during the experiment to different typefaces of Chinese characters, we find a significant difference between disliked and all characters in the frontal-central area in the 200-300 ms window after the stimulus׳ onset. In the 400-600 ms window, after the stimulus׳ onset, a significant bias for disliked characters emerges in frontal, central, parietal and occipital areas. Our results suggest that people could make a rapid, implicit esthetic preference for the typefaces of Chinese characters.

Aesthetic perception and its minimal content: a naturalistic perspective

Aesthetic perception is one of the most interesting topics for philosophers and scientists who investigate how it influences our interactions with objects and states of affairs. Over the last few years, several studies have attempted to determine "how aesthetics is represented in an object," and how a specific feature of an object could evoke the respective feelings during perception. Despite the vast number of approaches and models, we believe that these explanations do not resolve the problem concerning the conditions under which aesthetic perception occurs, and what constitutes the content of these perceptions. Adopting a naturalistic perspective, we here view aesthetic perception as a normative process that enables agents to enhance their interactions with physical and socio-cultural environments. Considering perception as an anticipatory and preparatory process of detection and evaluation of indications of potential interactions (what we call "interactive affordances"), we argue that the minimal content of aesthetic perception is an emotionally valued indication of interaction potentiality. Aesthetic perception allows an agent to normatively anticipate interaction potentialities, thus increasing sense making and reducing the uncertainty of interaction. This conception of aesthetic perception is compatible with contemporary evidence from neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and interaction design. The proposed model overcomes several problems of transcendental, art-centered, and objective aesthetics as it offers an alternative to the idea of aesthetic objects that carry inherent values by explaining "the aesthetic" as emergent in perception within a context of uncertain interaction.

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: insight from ERPs

The relation between attractiveness and motor affordance is a key topic in design and has not yet been investigated electrophysiologically. In this respect, action affordance and attractiveness represent two crucial dimensions in object processing (specifically for tools). In light of this evidence, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) enabled us to gain new insights into the time course of the interaction between these two dimensions during an explicit tool evaluation task. Behaviorally, tools that were judged as high affording and high attractive yielded faster response times than those judged as low affording and low attractive. The ERP results showed that early processes related to sensory gating and feature extraction (N100) were sensitive to both affordance and attractiveness; the P200 was dominated by affordance, indexing a facilitated access to motor action representation. The N300, P300 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) showed enhanced responses for highly affording/attractive tools, reflecting the interconnection between attractiveness and affordance. Later responses were entirely affected by attractiveness, suggesting additional affective responses evoked by desirable tools. We are showing that things that are perceived as more functional and attractive have a privileged neural activation in the time course of tool evaluation, for the first time.

Temporal dynamics of neural activity in an integration of visual and contextual information in an esthetic preference task

While viewing works of art in galleries, we evaluate them by integrating at least two types of information: their visual properties (e.g., colors, symmetry, and proportion) and contextual information accompanying them (e.g., titles and names of artists). How rapidly the brain integrates visual and contextual information of artworks remains to be investigated. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated neural activity when subjects with no professional experience in art viewed images of sculptures (masterpieces from the Classical and Renaissance periods, characterized by a canonical proportion of the golden ratio) and performed a five-scale rating of how appealing they were. At the beginning of each trial, we manipulated the expectations of the subjects for an upcoming sculpture by presenting information about its authenticity (either "genuine" or "fake"), although all images were actually taken from genuine artworks. The image of the sculpture was then presented, either in its original proportion or after being deformed by a photo-editing software. This 2 × 2 factorial design enabled us to identify whether each component of the EEG response was sensitive to contextual information (genuine or fake), visual information (original or deformed), or both. Results revealed that amplitudes of a positive EEG component emerging at 200-300ms after the presentation of the artworks (mainly distributed over the parietal cortex) were significantly modulated by both visual and contextual factors, indicating a rapid integration of these two types of information in the brain.

On the electrophysiology of aesthetic processing

One important method that can be applied for gaining an understanding of the underpinning of aesthetics in the brain is that of electrophysiology. Cognitive electrophysiology, in particular, allows the identification of components in a mental processing architecture. The present chapter reviews findings in the neurocognitive psychology of aesthetics, or neuroaesthetics, that have been obtained with the method of event-related brain potentials, as derived from the human electroencephalogram. The cognitive-perceptual bases as well as affective substages of aesthetic processing have been investigated and those are described here. The event-related potential method allows for the identification of mental processing modes in cognitive and aesthetic processing. It also provides an assessment of the mental chronometry of cognitive and affective stages in aesthetic appreciation. As the work described here shows, distinct processes in the brain are engaged in aesthetic judgments.

Aesthetic appreciation: event-related field and time-frequency analyses

Improvements in neuroimaging methods have afforded significant advances in our knowledge of the cognitive and neural foundations of aesthetic appreciation. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to register brain activity while participants decided about the beauty of visual stimuli. The data were analyzed with event-related field (ERF) and Time-Frequency (TF) procedures. ERFs revealed no significant differences between brain activity related with stimuli rated as “beautiful” and “not beautiful.” TF analysis showed clear differences between both conditions 400 ms after stimulus onset. Oscillatory power was greater for stimuli rated as “beautiful” than those regarded as “not beautiful” in the four frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta, and gamma). These results are interpreted in the frame of synchronization studies.