The Modularity of Aesthetic Processing and Perception in the Human Brain. Functional Neuroimaging Studies of N Euro Aesthetics

By taking advantage of the advent o f functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) this thesis argues that aesthetics belongs in the domain o f neurobiology by investigating the d ifferent brain processes that are implicated in aesthetic perception from two perspectives. The firs t experiment explores a specific artistic style that has stressed the problem in the relationship between objects and context. This study investigates the neural responses associated with changes in visual perception, as when objects are placed in their normal context versus when the object-context re lationship is violated. Indeed, an aim of this study was to cast a new ligh t on this specific artistic style from a neuroscientific perspective. In contrast to basic rewards, which relate to the reproduction of the species, the evolution of abstract, cognitive representations facilitates the use of a d ifferent class of rewards related to hedonics. The second part investigates the hedonic processes involved in aesthetic judgm ents in order to explore if such higher order cognitive rewards use the same neural reward mechanism as basic rewards. In the firs t o f these experiments we modulate the extent to which the neural correlates o f aesthetic preference vary as a function o f expertise in architecture. In the second experiment we aim to measure the more general effects o f labelling works o f art w ith cognitive semantic inform ation in order to explore the neural modulation of aesthetic preference relative to this information. The main finding o f this thesis is that stimulus affective value is represented separately in OFC, w ith positive reward (increasing aesthetic judgments) being represented in medial OFC and negative reward value is being represented in lateral OFC. Furthermore ventral striatum encode reward expectancy and the predictive value of a stimulus. These findings suggest a dissociation o f reward processing w ith separate neural substrates in reward expectancy and stimulus affective value.