Cognitive Neuroscience of Aesthetics

welcome to the second day of seeing knowing we have another lineup of really interesting speakers and we're going to begin this morning with talk by Marcus Nadal and he has a pH he works in the department I'll probably get this wrong so you can correct it but in the department of basic psychological research and research methods is that right okay at the university of vienna and he's going to speak to us today about the cognitive neuroscience of aesthetics thank you very much everyone for coming being here thank you very much Johanna Drucker for organizing this wonderful event and to the Minerva foundation for having us and treating us so nicely I hope you appreciate that this morning I did my hair up nicely for you that I chose some of my best clothes to wear that yesterday I actually ironed my shirt that I checked they were matching this morning I trimmed my beard to make it looks nice I know I could be wearing this inside my trousers and probably wearing some better shoes but sometimes there's a trade-off between looking nice and aesthetics and comfort but we do tend to appreciate the aesthetics of people of ourselves and our environment so we've had occasion here to appreciate the beauty of the campus the exquisite beauty of some of the glass work at Minerva house so let's call this aesthetic appreciation for the sake of this talk so aesthetic appreciation is being able to appreciate Beauty gracefulness also ugliness smooth voices nice places nice people let's call that just aesthetic appreciation for the sake of this talk and humans go to great lengths I spend time they spend resources on trying to make their places themselves others look nicer they enjoy the aesthetics we enjoy the aesthetics and you might think that this is because in our culture we're consumers and we consume beauty you consume fashion we're fashion victims and this is not representative of human species but that's wrong every known human culture has a very big interest in aesthetics in their own different way and unique way but it's not special to the Western culture in fact in all small-scale societies even those that are very simple in terms of material culture they invest a lot of time and effort in decorating and ornamenting their bodies so it's something that we do as a human species in fact in some cultures they even go through deep pain to make themselves beautiful to other people by scarring their bodies extensively there's not something particular to us but it's probably something particular to our species because with very few very very few exceptions we see nothing like that in the natural world except for our species so aesthetics is something that all humans do probably just different degrees and probably humans are the only species that do this aesthetic behavior and appreciate aesthetics in in others and the world around them to this extent so now you might be familiar with some of the chimpanzee painting another animal painting but the difference between chimpanzees painting which they enjoy a lot and you know give them paper and crayons and paint and they'll have a nice time applying colors to paper but then they completely lose interest and just abandon that and they're never interested in what other chimpanzees have painted so they'll never go to another chimpanzee and tell them show me what you've painted or they'll never go back to what they painted last week so they lose complete interest so they they're not capable from what we know of aesthetic appreciation of interests in the aesthetics of their own productions or the world around them this is not to say that chimpanzees and other species do not have visual preferences which they do and we're doing some research on visual preferences in other primates but it means to say that the extent to which we're concerned with the appearance of things in terms of beauty elegance happiness and all that it's pretty pretty unique to us and as a psychologist that's what I'm interested in I'm interested in understanding what enables our species to be interested in the aesthetics of the world around us what cognitive mechanisms in our minds endow our species with this capacity what neural mechanisms underlie these cognitive processes and what happened throughout evolution the evolution of our species that gave us this capacity to produce understand and appreciate the aesthetics around us and one of the things that I've come to realize is that we cannot answer these questions merely from a psychological perspective or merely from a neuroscientific perspective and that's why it's so great to be in an event that includes such a broad array of speakers with such different backgrounds talking about this same topic because that's what we need we need interdisciplinarity and variety of backgrounds and insights so when Jonah contacted me and gave what the topic of the conference would be seeing and knowing I immediately realized that this pairing of seeing and knowing is crucial is fundamentally linked to my topic of interest which is aesthetics as it was defined originally in the early 18th century as a discipline of philosophy that was concerned fundamentally with a sort of knowledge that came through the senses so knowing through seeing was the definition of Baumgarten to define aesthetics as in opposition to sort of knowing that's more rational through deduction and other sorts of higher cognition so aesthetics was knowing through seeing and hearing and touching and smelling and so on and so forth an aesthetics as a branch of philosophy although this says a short story short history has a very long history so before the 18th century and after the 18th century but I won't go into this and I'll just skip forward to the end of the 19th century where empirical aesthetics was introduced into psychology in particular aesthetics is actually the second oldest branch of experimental psychology and it was developed by feckner who first developed psychophysics and then went on to develop empirical aesthetics so although in psychology and in other branches of science the study of aesthetics is very a very small branch almost forgotten it actually was the second in our discipline and I must say that when I tell my colleagues in psychology and other branches of science that I study aesthetics and art they look to me and smile and say yeah that's interesting kind of you know they're not very impressed with with that because they don't think it's very serious they don't think it's very important it's more important to study language and social neuroscience and all of these things and that's I think because they have the opinion the general opinion that aesthetics is some sort of frivolous aspect to human behavior and with the examples I said at the beginning I tried to illustrate their aesthetics is always with us so we're in this room and we might be impressed by the symmetry of this room by the pleasantness of this room by the the openness of this whole building it's something that it's always with us so it's not frivolous it's something that we do continuously and this is something that feckner also realized he's also really interested in the way we pick up information and we use information from the environment and so his take on aesthetics was different from the take of philosophers because he wanted to do aesthetics from below that began with sensation he didn't begin with grand philosophical theories and then tried to fit the aesthetics into them he tried to begin with the facts the facts of preference the facts of liking and basically his idea was that empirical aesthetics should try to determine the sort of features and combinations of features that made objects designs artworks interesting likable Pleasant beautiful and the sort of parameters or in features that he was interested in its size shape balance color and so on and so forth there are sorts of colors and color combinations that people prefer to others so this is what he was interested in but mainly the main feature was proportion proportion had been studied in a similar way previous to feckner mostly by sizing who had emphasized the golden section as a very special proportion that was underlying the beauty and aesthetics of everything in the universe it was like a fundamental principle that organized the universe and allowed us to interact with it and appreciate and like it and enjoy it and this proportion was also the foundation of the beauty of the human body as you can see in this analysis he made of the apollo bed over there with all the the proportions of the body so going back to feckner what he aimed to do was to create a series of methods and theories that attempted to understand what the features that guided our preference were and how they actually make us prefer some things over others so he began by studying how subtle variations in proportions would lead people to prefer more or less what they were seeing and this transformed into a whole tradition that lasted until today that investigated whether people would prefer vertical to horizontal lines or certain curvatures certain sizes of circles and certain proportions of rectangles and triangles so on and so forth which is basically very bottom up so we're interested in the sort of information that comes from the environment and we enjoy like or prefer and this approach has lasted as I said until nowadays where people are studying for instance the impact of complexity complexity in objects in designs in artworks and the way that the different variations in complexity affect the way we like or would prefer there is objects so here are just some examples of sort of images stimuli that have been used by empirical estheticians to determine the extent to which people like complexity they've also used artworks but again just by studying the complexity that's inherent to these different artworks and the way this complexity influences people's liking do people prefer more complex objects do people prefer simple objects or are there different ways of creating complexity and it's different combinations of complexity this is one of the main approaches but this sort of approach really emphasizes only one part of the pairing which is the part of seeing and we're completely forgetting the part of knowing because we're treating people as if they didn't know anything about what they're seeing and they're automatically almost unmediated lis are picking up on some properties of the images or the sounds or the movements or whatever and they're reacting almost automatically to that okay so for instance so icing and feckner would have believed that just because we're viewing something that's proportionately in accordance to the golden section that you would find that beautiful there's no need to know what you're looking at there's no need to be familiar with that it's just unmediated almost by cognition but during the nineteen thirties and forties in psychology there was a large transformation in the way we understood perception most are driven by the work of the guest a psychologist who emphasized that perception is not just mere reception of information from the environment but the people are actually active in their perception and there are active agents and they contribute with the knowledge about the environment with expectations about the environment with rules and hypotheses about how the world works so people just don't receive they perceive and perceiving is an active process and they developed a serious as probably you know series of rules that govern perceptual grouping for instance and this image tends to illustrate the rule of similarity and people tend to group similar things together to the exclusion of things that are different so in this case we tend to see rows of black and white circles and in this case we tend to see columns of black and white circles so we don't see this as a row of black white black black and so on and so forth we tend to group these as columns and these as rows so this is not something that's in the environment it's something that we do with the environment to understand it better and they also posited the perception is active but also tends to simplify the world so we can understand it better so if I ask you what do you see here you'll probably answer well I see a square that's hiding a circle that's actually hiding a rectangle but that's something that you interpret about the environment that's not there what's there is actually this which is not what you are interpreting about the environment but you make up the existence of a circle and a rectangle okay so this is just to illustrate how your knowledge and your expectations about the world affect what you perceive so these developments in the psychology of perception affected the way empirical aesthetics was investigating their own subject and psychologists started wondering the sort of knowledge that was affecting the way people experience the world aesthetically and they tried to investigate this and they did this in two ways number one they manipulated the knowledge people have about what they're seeing just by giving them information in some cases and two by studying people who actually already have knowledge about that by showing artworks to people who don't know anything about those artworks and showing them also to maybe art historians or artists so the first and then sorry I just jumped this slide this integration of the human contribution to perception actually emphasize the part of knowing - the conviction that there's no seeing without knowing there's a real tight bond and what we were interested in is clarifying the way they're related so how does seeing affect knowing and how does knowing affect seeing in an aesthetic context so there are many studies now about comparing the impact of knowledge on aesthetic appreciation and as I said one of the ways experimenters have done that is by giving information to one group of people and not giving the information to another group of people and then trying to see how the perceptive features of objects affect the way they like it or the extent to which they prefer it and to see how the information provided has affected that liking or preferring and a very consistent result of these experiments is that people like things more when they know more about it so if we go to a museum and you look at artworks you're probably going to enjoy more those artworks if you have some sort of information about them and this is especially true when people know very little initially okay so information has an effect especially when that information is actually needed and as that another line of research has been to study the way experts people who already have large amount of knowledge about what they're going to see and interact with the way experts look or see the world one very common technique has been to use eye tracking so we're studying how experts look for instance at the artworks or designs and compare that way of looking to non experts and what we've learned is that for instance experts tend to focus more on the background on the composition and the general relations between the elements that are presented and naive people tend to focus on these specific elements and they're not focusing on the relation between the elements they tend to focus on the foreground images and they're not connecting those images with a background or get more general composition so your expertise about what you're looking really affects the way you look at it because you're exploring those images in a different way you know what you want to look for and the naive person is basically guided by what they commonly do in any other domain of their life which is to look at central figures and try to figure out what those elements are or mean or represent so this line of research empirical aesthetics somehow at the late 20th century collided with another line of research that was emerging at that time which is near aesthetics the nearest etics as a term as a concept towards a specific field of research was introduced by say miyazaki as the study of the neural basis of aesthetic experiences or art but although this was introduced this term of this field was introduced or named the late 20th century that been people for many decades before trying to understand the neural basis of our production and appreciation and aesthetics in general for instance using lesion studies so they would study patients who had been artistically productive for many years that had some sort of a brain lesion for instance a stroke and they would compare the art that was produced before and after and try and extract some sort of conclusion about the role of the brain the brain region that was lesion in the artistic production so this is one example of a painter lovest corinth who painted two artworks with similar theme you can see the difference from before and after and in some cases the art critics praised the result of the artistic production post lesion as being in this case more expressive more impressionistic than before so it's not necessarily that brain lesions were leading to a reduction in the artistic production or quality and brain lesions in both hemispheres effect artistic production they do it in different ways so in this case is an example of an artist two self-portraits one before one after a stroke to the right hemisphere so that interferes more with the spatial relationships scientists were also studying the effects of neurodegenerative diseases on artistic production so this is a paper that studied the production of car horn who developed Alzheimer's disease and as you can see he was very realistic in his depictions before the onset of the illness but as the illness progressed he lost the capacity to depict with realism although he was able to continue producing the production's gradually lost fidelity to reality so these are some of the later works just as an anecdote we know have a patient who also has Alzheimer's and she's an artist and she has difficulty in recognizing that these are not realistic so apparently to her this is could be a realistic depiction of a vase with flowers and she cannot see what we can see just some other examples we also know that brain lesions affect the experience of art not just the production of art but the way we like it the way we enjoy it we also know that neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's also have their effects but I'll just skip this and try and offer what for me is like a general map of the neural foundations of aesthetic appreciation and it should be very clear that there's not just one brain region that's salient so this means that there's no one brain sensor for aesthetic appreciation there's not like a beauty detector in the brain there's nothing like that appreciating the aesthetic of artworks or designs or anything really involves a broad network of brain regions that collaborate and interact heavily to allow us to have aesthetic enjoyments and these brain regions furthermore are not specific they're involved in many other domains of human life human perception of human reasoning and a human interaction with others so it's there's no specific not even just unique but not specifically dedicated brain region for aesthetics and these brain regions involve at least three different sorts of brain regions a collection of brain regions that are involved in emotion in effect in reward in generating and processing pleasant and unpleasant experiences a collection of brain regions like in this case the occipital cortex that's involved in perceptual processing one surprising thing when neuroimaging studies of aesthetics and art appreciation began was to find an increase in the activity of perceptual regions when people were finding images that they liked or they enjoyed or they preferred so brain activity in these perceptual regions increases with perceptual enjoyment and then a collection of brain regions mainly in the front that have to do with top-down regulation of cognition and attention and decision-making and so on and so forth so it's very broad array of brain regions so this is like a general map and returning to the effect of knowing gain using neuroimaging techniques scientists have tried to ascertain the impact of knowledge on the way these networks organize and function and again they've used the same two techniques they've manipulated the information they've been given to participants and they've collected information with participants who already have a lot of knowledge and information so what happens with these brain regions so one classic experiment asked participants while their brain activity was being recorded with fMRI to look at some images abstract artworks and they told participants that in some cases the artworks had been taken from very famous gallery and in another case these were actually being had been produced by the experimenters themselves using Photoshop okay in reality there were all proper artworks the only difference was that participants were led to believe that in some cases there were artworks and other cases they were not so what they found was an increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex for images participants believed were artworks and they also expressed a greater liking for these images even though they belong to the same sort of collection so we know from other studies that this brain region actually processes a reward value okay and it's involved in determining how much you want something on how much you like something could be chocolate could be wine could be artworks in another study a bit more recent they did a similar manipulation they shared artworks and they tell participants some of them were authentic and some of them were fake so participants in addition to liking more the artworks they believed were authentic again we found this oh they found an increased activity in the exhibit in the orbitofrontal cortex but also when participants believed the artworks were fake they found an increase in activity of a network that included frontal regions and occipital regions which correspond to participants effort in trying to determine why those images were actually fake so they were looking for imperfections maybe or clues that made them fake and in another study they used brain imaging technique that allowed them to determine at what time their specific brain activity they were looking for happened they told people again these artworks are genuine and these artworks are fake when they were all really you know genuine and what they found is an increase in activity in the protein the parietal cortex so a region that's involved in perceptual integration and so on very early on so this is between 200 and 280 milliseconds so the information that's being provided by the experiments is being integrated into the perceptual processes that vex the participants are doing at a very early stage in in the general processing turning now to expertise so experiments have confirmed tend to converge on three important findings that distinguish the brain activity of experts versus non experts in an aesthetic appreciation task mostly while experts are and experts and non-experts are asked to view images from the domain of expertise of the experts so this could be images of architecture buildings facades and comparing arty architects with non architects or art historians versus known art historians and you showing them pictures of artworks paintings manger so one thing that has been clear number one the different involvement of memory so number one the experts are relying more on stored information things they've learned things that no more than the naive people but tend to rely more on subjective impressions and transient opinions that might change from one moment to another the second aspect is less trivial or evident and is what people have referred to as efficient processing so in some studies experts appear to be using so to speak less neural effort to process those images in this case so in this case as you can see there's one study that we did the low experts versus the high experts have a higher positive deflection at 300 milliseconds approximately this is a task where people were just asked to view images and this positive deflection is smaller in the higher in the high scores so in the expert group so this is one case where it's like the experts are using less effort than the non experts to process those images and the third finding is that experts are much better as filled at filtering out irrelevant information to the task so in this experiment what they were the scientists did is pair images the participants were asked to value how much do you prefer this how much do you like it and with a logo of a supposed sponsor for the experiment okay so the money you're receiving to come to the experiment today was provided by this company or you provided with logos that didn't give you any money okay so this is a relevant information to the task of deciding whether you liked something or not and they had a group of participants who were expert arts expert of art and a group of participants who were not and as you can see there's a difference in a brain region called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is very close to the orbitofrontal cortex and is also involved in reward and integrating emotions and cognition and the difference in the activity of this brain region depending on whether you're watching or judging how much you like an image that was paired just besides the company that's supposed to be giving you money increases very much for the control so for the non-experts and decreases when you're watching or deciding whether you like an image that was paired with some other company that's not giving you money so the difference or the effect of the pairing with sponsors and non sponsors is almost non-existent for the art experts so they're able to filter out this information during the task they're supposed to be doing and there's a lot of other studies that tend to converging these findings so just to summarize in the 20 seconds that I have the duration between seeing and knowing is fundamental to aesthetics it's something that's in the definition of aesthetics early on researchers tended to focus more on the seeing part and less in the knowing part but we've come to accept that they're intimately bonded and that the interesting task is to understand how they interact and how they through this interaction they give rise to the aesthetic experience and we've only just begun to try and understand what their neural foundations of this interaction between seeing and knowing is and with that thank you very much for your attention should we wait for Mike's or yeah because I think the Mike's are coming thanks a great talk my question is what is your working definition of aesthetics because traditionally aesthetics had been inextricably linked to beauty until about the 19th century or essentially uh early on when cons first discussed aesthetics it was not even discussed in relation to art at all it was only discussed in relation to nature and and these days there's the the idea that aesthetics has to do with Beauty really isn't a common assumption anymore I think ever since Frank Sibley wrote a very influential essay in the 1950s or 40s about aesthetics as comprising different aesthetic properties some of which could be positive some of which could be negative the idea that sir beauty and aesthetics are linked has has sort of increasingly disappeared so it would be interesting to know how what your working definition of aesthetics is thanks for that question so let me try and go round it actually I wouldn't want to give the definition of aesthetics because I know there are people from the humanities and philosophers in the room so I'll leave it to them to provide a formal definition of aesthetics if they care to do so but the way the problem we have in your aesthetics one of the problems one of the many problems that we have in your aesthetics is that the people that work in your aesthetics actually don't agree on on a working definition of aesthetics we actually have big disagreements about what we're supposed to be studying okay and I will admit that most of the studies that have been done have been asking people how beautiful do you think this is so there's been in the research a tacit assumption that when you ask about aesthetics a good representative of aesthetics is beauty okay but we've come to learn I think through error and trial and error that this is not a good Association because this the prayer the presence of beauty or the the place that Beauty has in our life is very historically conditioned through philosophy and so on and so forth and it doesn't have such a place or maybe even such a meaning in other cultures so I personally would not associate aesthetics with beauty and I wouldn't associate aesthetics with art necessarily but I would say that there is a very prevalent interest that people have in niceness in comfort in smoothness and this is the sort of things that we're interested in so my definition is much more psychological than a grand definition of philosophical and more from the perspective of behavior and cognition rather than conceptually I'm not sure whether I yes because the recording thank you for a very interesting presentation I have two quick questions one you didn't mention the words computer artificial intelligence etc in terms of studying simulations of aesthetics or like Michel Noel's work from the 1960s or trying to explore computer-generated Beauty etc I wonder if you have any comments about that that's question one question two is the article in The New York Times this morning about culture influencing the sense of taste smell etc and recent researchers who see culture as affecting the sense of our senses and therefore in theory aesthetic reactions can I begin with a second there's no doubt that culture has a profound effect on the way we appreciate aesthetically there's no doubt in my mind culture gives us rules that govern how you appreciate aesthetics what what is aesthetic what is interesting from an aesthetic perspective what is salient what what aesthetic means for a culture and culture the culture we grow up educates us in how whatever an appropriate reaction to objects are in terms of aesthetics so it's profoundly guiding our aesthetic responses so Western aesthetics is profoundly different from some African small-scale societies aesthetics in that in their case for instance aesthetics is much more deeply related to profound meaning about life religion tradition and and moral values much more linked that than in our case so I would say that I haven't mentioned culture because I've tried to approach it from a psychological and from a neuroscientific perspective but obviously we're leaving out a very important part of it that we need to take as I said it's a very difficult task to approach just from one perspective and that's why it's nice to be surrounded with surrounded by anthropologists and philosophers that will be able to somehow in conversation try and solve these these questions as for your first question I am familiar with some of that work but as I said before there's so much that you could put into my presentation that at some point you just have to leave some something out there's a lot of research actually being done on simulations on computer simulations that generate arrays of objects that are then judged by artificial agents and you can just see generation after generation of artists and artworks develop and thrive and select and die out it's a very interesting aspect there informs is about the dynamics of the aesthetics throughout the generations I think you have a mic yes one of the things that I found very interesting and one of your charts mentioned that people watching movement dancers tended to react more proprioceptive ly rather than visually that the expertise even moves into very different dimensions of perception absolutely absolutely because for a dancer a movement there's more information in the proprioception of that movement they need the visuality of that movement so that's that's why it's in the slide where they're what I was saying that they're able to filter out less relevant information because the visual information is less relevant to them to this than the sensation of performing the movement when they're just viewing the movement or even a static position of a dance you have one up there and one here okay thank you I was wondering if the eye-tracking studies if you happen to know if I tracking study subjects generally know that their movements are being tracked or other ways of concealing that from the subject no it's very difficult because it's a bulky system sometimes for even wearing glasses people are trying to develop that in Vienna actually in a museum they're trying to conceal the cameras but that that's very difficult because you know it's systems but they started to do that discreetly just to record eye tracking of spontaneous visitors I would think that that would affect the results if if an art expert who had certain social or professional reasons to want to retain that status but may may make a conscious effort not to look too long it ya know a pair of breasts you become very self-conscious yeah when you know other people know exactly where you're looking at yeah so you very careful where you look at so I've been subject but this is common to almost all the techniques that I just mentioned so observing aesthetic appreciation in creating some conditions that are not that common to where people you know have aesthetic appreciation with might be your house a museum a concert hall and so on and so forth taking them to the lab sometimes you're sticking them in fMRI machines sometimes you have things on their face to measure facial EMG or these cameras so there's a certain degree to which we're interfering with that aesthetic appreciation just by trying to study that okay so one thing that we're really trying to do is to move out of the lab try to create environments there are less and natural to our participants and try and gauge to what extent our lab is actually interfering with what we want to study now that you measure that now and it doesn't annihilate aesthetic appreciation it just reduces it in a certain percentage that might be significant that makes probably makes a museum visit worthwhile and not a lab visit thank you very much

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 29 2014