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The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics conference: Prospects and pitfalls
for an emerging field
Marcos Nadal
a,
⇑
, Marcus T. Pearce
b
a
Human Evolution and Cognition (IFISC-CSIC) and Department of Psychology, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain
b
Centre for Cognition, Culture and Computation, Goldsmiths, University of London, London SE14 6NW, UK
article info
Article history:
Accepted 25 January 2011
Available online 18 February 2011
Keywords:
Neuroaesthetics
Aesthetic appreciation
Brain
Neuroimaging
Art
Painting
Music
Dance
abstract
Neuroaesthetics is a young field of research concerned primarily with the neural basis of cognitive and
affective processes engaged when an individual takes an aesthetic or artistic approach towards a work
of art, a non-artistic object or a natural phenomenon. In September 2009, the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics
Conference brought together leading researchers in the field to present and discuss current advances. We
summarize some of the principal themes of the conference, placing neuroaesthetics in a historical context
and discussing its scope and relation to other disciplines. We also identify what we believe to be the key
outstanding questions, the main pitfalls and challenges faced by the field, and some promising avenues
for future research.
Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Neuroaesthetics is still an emerging field of research. Although
it draws on research in many disciplines, it is rapidly taking shape
as a field of study in its own right with increasing numbers of jour-
nal articles and books contributing to its central themes. Some of
the researchers at the field’s forefront recently came together at
the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference (24–26 September
2009) to present their latest research on the relations between
artistic, philosophical, psychological, neural and evolutionary as-
pects of human aesthetic experiences. The conference also pro-
vided a forum for discussion and reflection on some of the field’s
core themes and problems. We start by examining the historical
roots of neuroaesthetics and identifying its scope before reporting
some of the contributions presented at the conference and framing
them within the context of the existing neurobiological literature
on the perception and production of visual art, dance and music.
Space will preclude us from referring to all the talks and posters
presented at the conference. So, throughout this paper we high-
light only to those explicitly attempting to characterize the neural
foundations of aesthetic experience and their evolution. We close
by highlighting what we believe are the main challenges faced
by this new field and the key research directions for its future
development.
2. Historical roots of neuroaesthetics
The history of neuroaesthetics reflects the development and
confluence of research in psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary
biology and philosophical aesthetics. Historically, these disciplines
have converged to examine aesthetic experience at the mid-eigh-
teenth century, the late nineteenth century, and the late twentieth
century.
Current thinking on the biological basis of artistic and aesthetic
creation and appreciation has its roots in the works of British
empiricists (Moore, 2002; Skov & Vartanian, 2009a). Drawing upon
the Cartesian notions of the human body as a machine and animal
spirits acting through the nerves to produce movements and con-
vey sensory information, Edmund Burke (1757) elaborated a phys-
iological explanation for the aesthetic experiences of sublimity and
beauty. He argued that the former is supported by the same biolog-
ical mechanisms as pain, while the physical causes of love and
pleasure underpin the latter. Any stimulus capable of producing
similar effects to the ‘‘unnatural tension, contraction or violent
emotion of the nerves’’ (Burke, 1757, p. 248) that characterize pain,
would lead to states of fear or terror, and would consequently con-
stitute a source of the sublime. Conversely, ‘‘a beautiful object pre-
sented to the sense, by causing a relaxation in the body, produces
0278-2626/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2011.01.009
⇑
Corresponding author. Address: Edifici Guillem Cifre, Universitat de les Illes
Balears, Crta Valldemossa, km 7,5, Palma de Mallorca 07122, Spain. Fax: +34 971
173190.
E-mail address: marcos.nadal@uib.es (M. Nadal).
Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
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journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/b&c
the passion of love in the mind’’ (Burke, 1757, p. 287). These phys-
iological explanations for aesthetic experiences were adopted and
expanded by contemporary authors, such as Uvedale Price (1810)
and Daniel Webb (1769, reproduced in Katz & HaCohen, 2003).
Burke, Price and Webb’s work reveals that neuroaesthetic themes
emerged naturally as soon as a plausible physiological framework
and adequate psychological concepts became available. However,
as noted by Moore (2002), the widespread and lasting influence
of Kant’s (1790/1892) transcendental perspective separated aes-
thetic experiences from emotion and sensory pleasure, and
brought to a halt this first physiological foray into aesthetics.
Work on the biological basis of aesthetic behavior did not
emerge again until the second half of the 19th century, when
Darwin (1859/1991) introduced the mechanism of natural selec-
tion to explain the evolution of organisms, and highlighted the role
of sexual selection throughout human evolution (Darwin, 1871/
1998). Some of the pioneering studies of early neuroscience were
also carried out at this time, including the identification of the cor-
tical mechanisms underlying language production and compre-
hension (Broca, 1863; Wernicke, 1874), and Brodmann’s (1909)
description of cortical cytoarchitectonic features. At the same time,
the foundations of scientific experimental psychology were being
established through the work of Fechner (1860) and Wundt
(1873, 1874).
It was in this context of the flourishing fields of evolution, neu-
roscience and psychology that interest in the biological basis of
aesthetics reappeared. Strongly influenced by Darwin’s natural
selection, Clay (1908) argued that humans’ aesthetic appreciation
conferred on mankind the selective advantage of being able to as-
sess the suitability of the environment around us in terms of its re-
sources and potential dangers. The role of sexual selection in the
origin and evolution of aesthetic appreciation was emphasized by
Allen (1880) and Darwin (1871/1998) himself. Habitat selection
and mate choice remain today two of the strongest explanations
of the origin and evolution of our capacity to appreciate beauty
(Dissanayake, 2007). The work of Marshall (1894), who developed
the 18th century notion that aesthetic experiences are mediated
by the neural mechanisms of pleasure and pain, and updated it
with the neurophysiology of the time, constitutes an excellent
example of late 19th century neuroaesthetics.
In retrospect, it might seem that the period between the mid
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had set the stage for a
golden age of neuroaesthetics. However, this turned out not to
be, as further developments of the field were frustrated by the ad-
vance and subsequent dominance of behaviorist psychology cham-
pioned by Thorndike (1911), Watson (1913) and Skinner (1938).
Even Fechner’s (1876) empirical aesthetics was unable to develop
and strengthen its links with the neurosciences in one direction
and evolutionary theory in the other. In Colin Martindale’s words,
the behaviorist era was ‘‘an unmitigated disaster for psychological
aesthetics’’ (Martindale, 2007, p. 123). The reduction of psychology
to the study of overt behavior deprived neuroscientists and evolu-
tionary theorists of a detailed account of cognitive and affective
processes involved in aesthetic experiences. Hence, in spite of
amazing advances made in evolutionary biology and neuroscience
during the first half of the 20th century, there was no psychological
framework that could integrate such developments into a compre-
hensive picture of the evolutionary and neural foundations of aes-
thetic creation and appreciation.
However, neuroscientists and evolutionary theorists saw no
reason to wait for psychologists to regain interest in cognition gen-
erally, and aesthetics in particular. Neurologists examined the rela-
tion between brain injuries, often associated with aphasia, and
artistic or aesthetic activities (Alajouanine, 1948; Gourevitch,
1967; Luria, Tsvetkova, & Futer, 1965; Zaimov, Kitov, & Kolev,
1969) and no sooner had evolutionary biologists turned to human
behavior than they began to write on aesthetics (
Alland, 1977;
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1988, 1989; Wilson, 1975).
Eventually, the tradition of empirical aesthetics founded by
Fechner (1876) was given new life by the research of Daniel
Berlyne (1971, 1974). As a result, the psychological approach to
aesthetic and artistic appreciation and creation gained momentum
during the last few decades of the twentieth century. The dialogue
between psychology and neuroscience was complemented by sev-
eral theoretical proposals hypothesizing links between specific
brain activity and certain aspects of aesthetic experience based
on the growing knowledge of brain function (Changeux, 1994;
Miall, 1977; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999; Zeki, 1998, 2001;
Zeki & Lamb, 1994).
We believe that two fundamental developments afforded
researchers a third chance to consolidate the field of neuroaesthet-
ics around the turn of the millennium. First, the notion of a single
special mechanism underlying aesthetic experiences has been
dropped in favor of the view that aesthetic appreciation and re-
lated phenomena rely on several general mechanisms, including
processes of perception, memory, attention, decision-making, and
reward and emotion (Chatterjee, 2004a; Leder, Belke, Oeberst, &
Augustin, 2004). Given what we know of the neural correlates of
such processes, it follows that aesthetic experiences must emerge
from the dynamic interaction of activity in multiple brain regions
at different time frames.
The second shift is methodological in nature. Until recently only
two strategies were available for studying the biological mecha-
nisms underlying artistic appreciation and creation: first, making
theoretical conjectures based on general understanding of brain
structure and function; and second, single case-studies of brain
injuries affecting art-related activities. The former produced theo-
ries that often went untested (and were sometimes untestable),
while the latter generated accounts that were often anecdotal,
incomplete and difficult to interpret. However, the advent and
refinement of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques has permit-
ted the empirical study of healthy participants’ aesthetic experi-
ences in controlled situations, affording the opportunity to draw
general conclusions about the neural processes underlying the per-
ception and production of art (Brattico & Jacobsen, 2009;
Cela-Conde et al., 2009; Cupchik, Vartanian, Crawley, & Mikulis,
2009; de Tommaso et al., 2008; Di Dio, Macaluso, & Rizzolatti,
2007; Fairhall & Ishai, 2008; Ishai, Fairhall, & Pepperell, 2007; Kirk,
Skov, Christensen, & Nygaard, 2009; Kirk, Skov, Hulme, Christensen,
& Zeki, 2009; Koelsch, Fritz, von Cramon, Müller, & Friederici, 2006;
Lengger, Fischmeister, Leder, & Bauer, 2007; Müller, Höfel, Brattico,
& Jacobsen, 2009; Yue, Vessel, & Biederman, 2007).
3. The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference: A timely event
Six years have now passed since the first applications of neuro-
imaging to aesthetic appreciation of paintings (Cela-Conde et al.,
2004; Jacobsen, Schubotz, Höfel, & von Cramon, 2006; Kawabata
& Zeki, 2004; Vartanian & Goel, 2004) and the first thorough re-
views of the effects of brain lesions on artistic production and
appreciation (Chatterjee, 2004b, 2006; Zaidel, 2005). Subsequently,
the number of neuroimaging studies has exploded, as the sample
of citations in the preceding paragraph shows. Although all these
studies share the common goal of understanding the neural under-
pinnings of aesthetic behavior, there are many differences in tech-
nique, stimuli and theoretical background.
Today, neuroaesthetics is a rather heterogeneous research area:
scientists have entered the field with different backgrounds, inter-
ests and questions in mind. Hence, there is not necessarily a con-
sensus on what the important questions are or about how best to
produce answers. The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference (held
M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
173
at the University of Copenhagen, September 24–26, 2009) provided
a timely opportunity to reflect upon differences in the methods
and results of recent studies, to address crucial unresolved issues
and to synthesize a unified picture of our current understanding
of the biological basis of artistic and aesthetic experience.
The conference broke new ground in several respects. First, the
organizers—Søren Kaspersen, Jon O. Lauring, and Martin Skov—
brought together over 25 researchers from a broad range of fields,
including anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, art history, psy-
chology, neuroscience and zoology, to present and discuss their re-
search on neuroaesthetics. Second, the program was both broad
and coherent, covering a variety of artistic forms (painting, litera-
ture, music, dance and film) and a range of humanistic, cognitive,
neuroscientific, and evolutionary approaches. Third, the atmo-
sphere invited attendants to exchange ideas and perspectives,
and to contribute constructive criticism. Presentations were fol-
lowed by short (and usually lively) discussions, which continued
into coffee and lunch breaks, and there was a final session for gen-
eral discussion at the end of the Conference. In the remainder of this
paper we report some of the most groundbreaking contributions
and fruitful discussions. As noted, our focus will be on those aiming
to identify brain regions involved in aesthetic appreciation and its
evolution. This selection includes presentations on appreciation of
painting, music, dance, and human faces. We begin our report,
though, with one of the most pressing issues: the definition of
the field’s scope and methods.
1
4. What is neuroaesthetics?
One of the main issues raised at the Conference was the defini-
tion and scope of the field. Neuroaesthetics is often conceived as
the study of the neural basis of the production and appreciation
of artworks (Changeux, 1994; Nalbantian, 2008; Zeki, 1998,
2001; Zeki & Lamb, 1994). However, Brown and Dissanayake
(2009) argued that because art goes beyond aesthetic concerns,
this definition is too broad in that it attempts to account for the
biological underpinnings of artistic behavior, which includes a
number of cognitive and affective mechanisms that have no aes-
thetic relevance. Hence, they contend that in addition to neuroaes-
thetics, a field of neuroartsology is required. In contrast to this
view, authors such as Skov and Vartanian (2009a) have used the
term neuroaesthetics in a rather more general way to encompass
the study of the biological roots of the variety of psychological
and neural processes involved in the creation and perception of
artistic and non-artistic objects. In this sense, neuroaesthetics is
close to what Fitch, von Graevenitz, and Nicolas (2009) have de-
fined as bioaesthetics.
We believe that at this stage of the field’s development, a broad
and inclusive definition is preferable. Accordingly, throughout this
paper we use the term neuroaesthetics to encompass the study of
the neural and evolutionary basis of the cognitive and affective
processes engaged when an individual takes an aesthetic or artistic
approach towards a (western or non-western) work of art (used in
the broad sense to include music, film, theater, poetry, literature,
architecture and so on), a non-artistic object or a natural phenom-
enon. Such a definition is broad enough to include the psycholog-
ical and neural processes underlying, for instance, the assessment
of a renaissance masterpiece by art experts (artists, art critics, art
historians), the appreciation by non-experts of the same artwork,
a decorative vase, a sports car, a pair of shoes in a window shop,
a human face or figure, a flower, a sunset or a storm, the creation
of artworks and designs, as well as the evolutionary processes that
have conferred on our species such neural and psychological pro-
cesses. This broad coverage and focus on psychological experience
rather than a particular class of artefacts has the advantage of
allowing research in neuroaesthetics to establish the effects of
the artistic status or usage of objects, assessing the influence
of individuals’ background, and so on. It also allows researchers
to draw upon a broad range of studies to frame and interpret their
own results.
In his contribution to the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Confer-
ence, entitled Visual neuroaesthetics: Principles and practice, Anjan
Chatterjee distinguished three complementary approaches for
neuroscientists interested in aesthetic questions. The first and
most basic is to propose theories about how artists might use an
implicit understanding of the brain’s perceptual systems to engage
their audience in their work. The second approach goes beyond
such observations to neuropsychological and clinical examinations
of how disrupting brain function affects artistic creation and
appreciation. The third approach seeks to actually test hypotheses
about the neural basis of artistic appreciation and production, pri-
marily using neuroimaging. Although Chatterjee believes the third
approach to be the most scientifically sound, he notes that it makes
the tacit assumption that complex artistic and aesthetic experi-
ences result from the interaction of simpler processes whose con-
tribution to aesthetic experience can be investigated separately.
However, this may not be the case: it may be impossible to isolate
the component processes without losing the aesthetic experience
itself. Even the fact that almost all studies are performed in labora-
tories using specially designed stimuli, often artificially created or
standardized in some way, is a strongly limiting factor. Outside the
laboratory people can choose the context in which they wish to en-
gage in aesthetic or artistic activities (the privacy of their homes,
museums, concert halls, among others), the length of time they
wish to do so and, most of the time, the music they wish to hear,
the exhibition they wish to visit, and so on. So the question of eco-
logical validity remains: are experiences elicited in the laboratory
genuinely aesthetic experiences, and if so, can current methods
really capture the essence of those experiences?
Several of the conference’s participants presented the results of
fMRI studies of participants performing aesthetic appreciation
tasks. As in other areas of neuroscience, however, blobs of signifi-
cant BOLD response tell us little unless one really understands
their relation to the cognitive and affective processes involved in
the specific task. Helmut Leder’s contribution to the conference,
Why do we like art? Psychological explanations, described a five-
stage psychological model of aesthetic appreciation, and argued
that it can function as an interpretative framework for neuroimag-
ing and brain-damage studies.
The first of these stages is perceptual analysis, which is con-
cerned with organization, grouping, symmetry analysis, complex-
ity and other perceptual features that are known to influence
aesthetic appreciation. In the second stage, the analysis of familiar-
ity, prototypicality and meaning is performed, together with the
implicit and automatic integration of information with pre-exist-
ing memory structures. Processes involved in explicit classification
are performed in the third phase, including those related with the
style and the content of the stimulus. Thereafter, in the cognitive
mastering stage, the stimulus is interpreted on art-specific and
self-related grounds. Finally, the model provides two different out-
puts: a cognitive state, product of the earlier cognitive stages, and
an affective state, resulting from continuous interactions between
the aforementioned processes and diverse affective mechanisms.
The cognitive state provides the basis for aesthetic judgment, while
the affective state generates emotional responses.
This model, which summarizes a considerable body of research
within empirical aesthetics, highlights the complex interaction
among many cognitive and affective processes that gives rise to
1
Full details of all presentations and posters can be found at http://naconfer-
ence.ikk.ku.dk/keynote/.
174 M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
aesthetic experiences. Neuroaestheticians, thus, face the challenge
of creating experimental designs that can tease apart the relations
between activity in specific brain regions and specific cognitive
and affective processes in aesthetic experience.
5. Insights from brain damage and degeneration
In her presentation, Art, beauty, brain and neuropsychology,at
the conference, Dahlia Zaidel argued that neuropsychological evi-
dence shows artistic skill and creativity to be surprisingly resistant
to brain damage. Contrary to popular belief, there is no strong neu-
ropsychological evidence for a right hemisphere specialization for
visual art. Similarly, although music was once thought to be pre-
dominantly right-lateralized, it is now known to engage neural
processes in both hemispheres (Levitin & Tirovolas, 2009). Zaidel’s
study of artists that suffered unilateral damage to the brain reveals
that they could continue painting with the same style they had
developed prior to the injury. The observable modifications to their
technique seem to be due more to the limitations caused by the
damage itself or attempts to adapt to it. Artists suffering from
dementia also retained their artistic skill and style until the degen-
eration of cognitive faculties was all-pervasive. These observations
contrast with those of Annoni, Devuyst, Carota, Bruggimann, and
Bogousslavsky’s (2004) who reported visible modifications in the
style of two professional painters after a stroke. In fact, several
studies have shown that various neurological conditions, including
epilepsy, migraine, and different neurodegenerative diseases, had a
significant impact on artists’ work (Bogousslavsky & Boller, 2005;
Rose, 2006). It has been argued that when the lesion is more local-
ized, such as that caused by a stroke, the effects on artistic produc-
tion are subtle and can be difficult to detect at all after the acute
phase, whereas dementias and other more general conditions do
tend to have visible effects (Bogousslavsky, 2005; Boller, Sinforiani,
& Mazzucchi, 2005).
In some instances neurological disorders, far from hampering
artistic production, can spark creativity – even in people with no
prior inclination towards art. Miller, Boone, Cummings, Read, and
Mishkin (2000) studied the painting and musical performance of
patients suffering from left anterior frontotemporal dementia,
affecting mainly their anterior temporal lobe, who sustained or ap-
peared to acquire novel painting or musical skills. The authors de-
scribed the paintings as lacking in abstract and symbolic features,
they mostly depicted landscapes, people or animals that were
either copied or remembered, or perfected visual designs. Mell,
Howard, and Miller (2003) attribute this emergence of artistic tal-
ent to the release from the influence of the dominant language-re-
lated thinking usually exerted over the non-dominant posterior
right temporal and parietal cortex, thought to play a role in accu-
rate drawing. In contrast with prior descriptions of these patients’
work, however, Rankin et al. (2007) later reported that paintings by
patients with frontotemporal dementia were judged by an expert
panel as bizarre, as often including abstracted or simplified images,
containing few details, deviating from explicit and representa-
tional depictions, and suggestive of a spatial organization deficit.
It is clear from this brief overview that there is little agreement
as to the nature and extent of the impact of neurological conditions
on the production of art. In addition to the scarcity of these cases,
the patients were affected by very different syndromes, at different
ages, they were skilled to different degrees before being affected,
and differed widely in terms of their educational and social back-
grounds, and even basic demographic variables such as age and
sex. Although elaborating meaningful general conclusions under
these conditions is not an easy task, a systematic meta-analysis
is clearly warranted.
Another problem derives from the lack of common measure-
ment and interpretative instruments available to researchers. As
clearly shown in Chatterjee’s presentation at the conference,
researchers have described the paintings created by brain-damaged
patients using varied and imprecise terms, at different levels of gen-
erality, and attending to different features. In his contribution,
Chatterjee presented a procedure developed precisely to overcome
this difficulty, the Assessment of Art Attributes Test. This instru-
ment has been designed to enable a standard appraisal of pictorial
works created by patients before and at different stages after onset
of their condition. The test includes quantitative measures of
abstraction, balance, color saturation and temperature, complexity,
depth, emotion, realism, stroke, or symbolism, among others
(Chatterjee, Widick, Sternschein, Smith, & Bromberger, 2010). Such
an instrument will facilitate comparisons across studies and allow
researchers to move beyond vague and imprecise assessments of
the impact of neurological conditions on artistic production.
Despite these limitations, there are some clear conclusions
afforded by the kind of studies discussed above. Zaidel and Chat-
terjee’s contributions summarized these conclusions, which are
developed in detail elsewhere (Chatterjee, 2004b; Zaidel, 2005,
2010). First, neuropsychological studies have revealed that artistic
and aesthetic experiences involve the participation of several brain
regions. Second, there seems to be no clear hemispheric advantage
for artistic or aesthetic activities, which does not preclude a certain
degree of hemispheric asymmetry for cognitive or affective pro-
cesses underlying such activities. Third, our capacity to create
and appreciate aesthetic and artistic phenomena emerges from
the interaction between processes of perception, memory, deci-
sion-making, emotion and attention.
6. The neuroimaging of visual aesthetics
6.1. Visual art
Edward Vessel’s presentation, This is your brain on art, reported
an fMRI study in which participants indicated how beautiful, com-
pelling, moving or powerful they found artworks. The strength of
the aesthetic experience correlated with activity in several tempo-
ral and prefrontal cortical areas involved in high-level sensory pro-
cessing and judgment, as well as in subcortical regions related with
reward, including the thalamus, the pontine reticular formation,
and the caudate. There was greater activation in the medial frontal
cortex, substantia nigra and hippocampus, while participants
viewed their most liked artworks, compared to all other stimuli.
Vessel argued that these regions play a special role in highly mov-
ing aesthetic experiences (see Table 1 below for a summary of neu-
roimaging results presented at the conference).
Martin Skov’s presentation, Evidence for a process theory account
of aesthetic valuation, covered several fMRI studies exploring the
influence of expertise and contextual information on aesthetic
experiences. In one study, his team presented photographs of
buildings and faces to architects and non-architects, who indicated
how appealing they found them. Activation in the medial orbito-
frontal cortex increased with level of appeal for both groups,
although the increase was greater for the group of experts when
viewing buildings. Activation in the anterior cingulate cortex was
also related with aesthetic ratings. Whereas such activation was
similar for both groups of participants while rating faces, activation
in this region increased for experts and decreased for non-experts
when they rated buildings. Conversely, nucleus accumbens activa-
tion correlated with appeal irrespective of expertise and stimulus
kind (see Kirk, Skov, Christensen, et al., 2009, for additional
details).
In another study (Kirk, Skov, Hulme, et al., 2009), naïve partici-
pants were asked to rate the appeal of computer generated ab-
stract paintings. Participants were told that some of the images
they would see belonged to a renowned art museum and that
M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
175
others had been created by the experimenter using a computer
program. The results showed that medial orbitofrontal activation
correlated more strongly with appeal ratings when participants
were told that the paintings were exhibited in the museum, sug-
gesting that this region is sensitive to the effect of expectations
on hedonic value. Based on his research, Skov defended the con-
ception of aesthetic values as the manifestation of a general system
that motivates decisions about behavior. In this system, and in the
psychological model presented by Leder, aesthetic judgments in-
volve both bottom-up and top-down processing of a sensory object
and are sensitive to context and to the prior experience of the
observer.
6.2. Human beauty
In addition to visual art, the conference also covered a topic of
special interest in visual neuroaesthetics: facial beauty. Other peo-
ple’s faces constitute highly relevant stimuli for humans, and face
perception is mediated by distributed neural regions (Ishai, 2007),
including the extrastriate cortex, which is specially dedicated to
processing individual identity, and the superior temporal sulcus,
which processes facial movements involved in speech and direct-
ing gaze. Regions of the limbic system, such as the amygdala and
insula, are involved in recognizing facial expressions of emotion.
Research during the last decade has revealed that facial beauty is
processed by regions of the reward circuit, especially the nucleus
accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex (Aharon, Etcoff, Ariely,
Chabris, O’Connor, & Breiter, 2001; Kampe, Frith, Dolan, & Frith,
2001; O’Doherty et al., 2003), as well as ventral occipital cortex
(Chatterjee, Thomas, Smith, & Aguirre, 2009).
Research presented by Alumit Ishai at the conference aimed to
throw light on the role of gender and sexual orientation on ratings
of attractiveness for male and female faces. Participants included
heterosexual and homosexual men and women. The results
showed that for heterosexual women and homosexual men, activa-
tion in orbitofrontal cortex was higher for attractive male faces
than attractive female faces, whereas the converse was true for
heterosexual men and homosexual women. According to Ishai,
the orbitofrontal cortex represents the reward value of faces of po-
tential sexual partners, rather than reproductive fitness. It should
be noted, however, that the relationship between facial beauty
and reward is not necessarily straightforward. Aharon et al.
(2001) found that young, heterosexual males rated pictures of
beautiful male and female faces as attractive but would exert effort
to extend their viewing of the beautiful females only, suggesting
that only these were rewarding.
Another presentation at the conference generalized the discus-
sion from facial beauty to all aspects of human beauty. In his talk,
Darwinian aesthetics: Perfect faces, perfect bodies, perfect genes? Karl
Grammer reviewed the empirical evidence for the effects of facial
symmetry, skin texture, body odor, voice and gait on the percep-
tion of beauty and how these effects are related to sexual selection.
Female faces, for example, are rated as significantly more attractive
during ovulation, and Grammer argued that this is because skin
texture and color become more homogeneous and facial features
more symmetrical. We return to the evolutionary aspects of Gram-
mer’s presentation below.
6.3. The appreciation of visual motion in dance
Although research in neuroaesthetics has tended to focus on vi-
sual art, independent research on music and dance is now begin-
ning to make significant contributions to the field. In fact, several
presentations at the conference focused on perception of visual
motion in dance. This research is based on the neuroscience of
body posture and movement perception, which has uncovered
two specialized routes for processing human bodies. One of these,
which involves areas of the dorsal visual system and the premotor
cortex, seems to process bodies in a configural manner, and acti-
vate the observers’ own sensoriomotor representations. The other
route, which is part of the ventral visual processing stream, and in-
cludes the extrastriate body area, appears to be specialized in the
processing of specific details of body posture (Urgesi,
Calvo-Merino, Haggard, & Aglioti, 2007).
One topic of special interest is the influence of motor expertise
on action observation. Greater activation in premotor cortex, pari-
etal areas, which have a somatotopical organization, and superior
temporal sulcus, involved in biological motion perception, has
been observed when expert dancers view movements correspond-
ing to their own style compared to the other style (Calvo-Merino,
Glaser, Grèzes, Passingham, & Haggard, 2005; Cross, Hamilton, &
Grafton, 2006; Orgs, Dombrowski, Heil, & Jansen-Osmann, 2008).
Calvo-Merino, Ehrenberg, Leung, and Haggard (2010) showed that
dance expertise enhances mainly configural, rather than featural,
processing of dance movements.
Calvo-Merino’s contribution to the conference, Neuroaesthetics
of performing arts: A sensoriomotor approach, dealt with the neuro-
science of movement from an aesthetic perspective. She reported
an experiment in which short video clips of ballet movements
were shown to ballet dancers and non-dancers during MRI acqui-
sition. The stimuli were presented in pairs and participants were
required either to indicate whether the movements were the same
or different, or to choose which they liked most. The results re-
vealed that the preferred dance movements elicited greater activa-
tion in premotor cortex, especially for experts, suggesting that
aesthetic preference for dance involves an enhanced cortical
Table 1
Location of main brain activation reported in the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference presentations highlighted in this report.
Presenter Stimuli Prefrontal cortex Other cortical regions Subcortical regions
Vessel Paintings IFG, SFG, OFC, mPFC Superior temporal sulcus Substantia nigra
Inferotemporal sulcus Hippocampus
Collateral sulcus Caudate
Thalamus
Pontine reticular formation
Skov Architecture ACC, OFC mPFC Ventral striatum
Ishai Faces OFC
Calvo-Merino Dance movements Visual cortex
Premotor cortex
Koelsch Music Insula Ventral striatum
Rolandic operculum Amygdala
Temporal poles Hippocampus
Brattico Music ACC, mPFC Temporal poles Ventral striatum
Jacobsen Music and visual designs IFG, mPFC
ACC: Anterior cingulate cortex; IFG: Inferior frontal gyrus; mPFC: Medial prefrontal cortex; OFC: Orbitofrontal cortex; SFG: Superior frontal gyrus.
176 M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
representation of those movements. The second experiment
reported by Calvo-Merino was designed to determine the relative
contribution of the two body-processing streams identified by
Urgesi et al. (2007). In this study, they used transcranial magnetic
stimulation over the dorsal and ventral pathways while partici-
pants rated how much they liked various dance postures. Results
showed that the procedure interfered with aesthetic appreciation
especially when applied over the dorsal pathway, that is, the one
involved in configural processing. This suggests that the general
configural aspects of dance have a stronger effect on aesthetic
appreciation than the specific features of body postures.
7. Neuroaesthetics of music
There is emerging evidence that distinct neural structures sub-
serve the perception of many different musical attributes, includ-
ing pitch features (absolute pitch, pitch interval, contour),
temporal features (e.g., rhythm, meter, tempo), loudness, timbre
and spatial location (Levitin & Tirovolas, 2009; Peretz & Zatorre,
2003). For example, pitch processing appears to be based on tono-
topic representations in primary and secondary auditory cortices
and there is evidence that distinct cortical regions process pitch
interval and pitch contour (Liégeois-Chauvel, Peretz, Babaï,
Laguitton, and Chauvel, 1998; Stewart, Overath, Warren, Foxton,
& Griffiths, 2008). There is also some evidence for a distinct audi-
tory ‘where’ pathway in posterior auditory and inferior parietal
cortex encoding the spatial location of sounds (Zatorre, Bouffard,
Ahad, & Belin, 2002; Scott, 2005). Research with Parkinson’s pa-
tients converges with neuroimaging data to suggest that the basal
ganglia play a crucial role in the perception of a metrical beat in
music (Grahn, 2009).
Modular models of the neural processing of music (Koelsch &
Siebel, 2005; Peretz & Coltheart, 2003) propose that the represen-
tations created by perceptual analysis are passed onto limbic and
paralimbic emotional systems including both cortical and subcor-
tical structures. The latter include the amygdala, nucleus accum-
bens and parahippocampal gyrus while regions in the frontal
cortex, especially the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal
cortex are also thought to be key to the emotional processing of
music (Peretz, 2010).
The affective valence of music is thought to be influenced in part
by tempo and mode such that slow, minor-key music is associated
with negative emotions and fast major-key music is associated with
positive emotions (Khalfa, Schön, Anton, & Liégois-Chauvel, 2005).
Neuroimaging research has associated positively-valenced re-
sponses to classical music with activation in the bilateral ventral
and left dorsal striatum, left anterior cingulate and left parahippo-
campal gyrus, while negatively-valenced responses with activation
in the hippocampus and amygdala (Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton,
Andrew & Williams, 2007). Emotionalresponses to music arecentral
to neuroaesthetics research and were covered by several presenta-
tions at the conference.
Andrea Halpern’s contribution, Major–minor perception by musi-
cians and non-musicians, presented a series of experiments examin-
ing the relationship between major and minor keys and the
experience of happiness and sadness in music. While musicians
easily distinguish between major and minor keys, non-musicians
do not unless the words ‘major’ and ‘minor’ are replaced by ‘happy’
and ‘sad’. However, in an ERP study, only musicians produced a
strong electrophysiological response to the first note in a melody
that distinguishes it as minor but not to the major equivalent, sug-
gesting that they were recruiting distinct neural processes from
non-musicians. Many questions remain about the role of tempo
and mode in generating musical emotions. It is unknown, for
example, to what extent these are universal associations or cultur-
ally determined through experience. The issue of whether listeners
actually feel the emotions they attribute to music or whether they
are simply assigning emotional labels to particular kinds of music
also remains open. It is important that future research investigates
the development of emotional responses to music and also the
emotional responses of non-Western listeners to address these
questions and identify other determinants of valence in musical re-
sponses. It is also important to determine other features of music
that reliably generate particular emotional responses and under-
stand why they do so.
A complementary approach to studying the neural basis of emo-
tional responses to music is to leave aside the question of which
musical features generate emotional responses and simply rely
on listener’s self-reported emotional ratings to identify musical
stimuli that generate different emotional responses.
Mitterschiffthaler et al. (2007) took this approach but didn’t
control for preference for their musical stimuli. At the conference,
Elvira Brattico presented research which examined for the first
time how happiness and sadness conveyed by music interact with
its aesthetic effects. In her talk, The neural correlates of the aesthetic
experience of music, she reported an fMRI experiment in which par-
ticipants self-selected happy and sad pieces of music that they
liked or disliked. Preferred music activated limbic and paralimbic
regions, including cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex
and ventral striatum, whereas the emotional content of music
differentially activated temporal lobe structures.
A second strand of research on emotional responses to music
has examined they way in which music stimulates arousal. This
was the topic of a presentation by Stefan Koelsch at the conference
addressing the question What makes music pleasant and unpleas-
ant? The theoretical groundwork for research in this area was laid
down by Meyer (1956) who proposed that music sets up expecta-
tions for what is to come next; confirmation and violation of these
expectations generate an experience of tension and resolution
which produces emotional responses. Listeners’ expectations re-
flect the probabilities of musical events occurring suggesting that
they are tuned through experience to provide good predictions of
the environment (Pearce & Wiggins, 2006). As a result, confirma-
tions of musical expectation are often rewarding. However, some-
what paradoxically, violations of expectation may also be
pleasurable possibly due to the contrast between the initial startle
of surprise and its subsequent appraisal as innocuous (Huron,
2006).
Huron (2006) has suggested that violations of expectation in
music produce characteristic emotional and physiological re-
sponses related to fight, flight or freeze responses to environmental
danger. This is supported by the recent finding that violations of
pitch expectation in melody generate patterns of beta band activa-
tion characteristic of auditory-motor synchronization (Pearce,
Ruiz, Kapasi, Wiggins, & Bhattacharya, 2010). Empirical research
with EEG has demonstrated that unexpected chords in music pro-
duce characteristic electrophysiological responses and higher
arousal indicated by galvanic skin response (Steinbeis, Koelsch, &
Sloboda, 2006). Another kind of physiological response to viola-
tions of musical expectation is frisson: the shivers or ’chills’ that
some people experience in response to some pieces of music
(Grewe, Kopiez and Altenmüller, 2009; Huron, 2006; Sloboda,
1991). Chills are a common and pleasurable physiological response
to music (Grewe et al., 2009) and produce changes of activation of
brain regions such as the ventral striatum, orbito-frontal and ven-
tromedial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala which are associated
with reward (Blood & Zatorre, 2001). The involvement of reward-
related areas in aesthetic responses to music is consistent with
the findings of research with visual art.
In Copenhagen, Koelsch also discussed another feature that is
capable of generating pleasurable and displeasurable responses
to music: consonance and dissonance. Previous research has found
M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
177
that orbitofrontal, cingulate, and frontopolar cortices mediate the
experience of pleasant consonant music (Blood, Zatorre, Bermudez,
& Evans, 1999). Koelsch reported an fMRI study designed to deter-
mine the neural correlates of listening to pleasant and unpleasant
music (Koelsch et al., 2006). Whereas Blood et al. (1999) used com-
puterized sounds as stimuli, Koelsch used fragments of joyful
instrumental tunes as well as continually dissonant counterparts
of these fragments. Participants without musical training or educa-
tion were asked to listen carefully to the music while tapping to
the beat, and then indicate how pleasant or unpleasant they felt.
The results showed that while dissonant music activated struc-
tures related to processing negatively valenced stimuli (amygdala,
hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus and temporal poles), conso-
nant music activated areas such as the insula and rolandic opercu-
lum, involved in vocal sound production, as well as the ventral
striatum. These results reveal that the perception of pleasant music
is mediated by reward circuitry as well as a perception–execution
system representing vocalizable auditory information.
These neuroimaging results have found corroboration in neuro-
psychological research. It has been shown, for example, that pa-
tients with lesions to the parahippocampal gyrus rate dissonant
musical excerpts as pleasurable although they are unimpaired on
judgements of emotional valence (Gosselin et al., 2006). Damage
to the amygdala, on the other hand, impairs the recognition of neg-
atively valenced music (scary and sad) while sparing the percep-
tual discrimination of happiness and sadness in music (Gosselin,
Peretz, Johnson, & Adolphs, 2007).
8. Neural basis of aesthetic experience
In bringing together the results of the presentations highlighted
in this paper, it becomes clear that aesthetic and artistic activities
typically involve a network of brain regions distributed over both
hemispheres, rather than a specialized area. Functional analysis
of these regions suggests that aesthetic appreciation of painting,
music and dance involves at least three different kinds of measur-
able brain activity: (i) An enhancement of low-level cortical sen-
sory processing; (ii) high-level top-down processing and
activation of cortical areas involved in evaluative judgment; (iii)
an engagement of the reward circuit, including cortical (anterior
cingulate, orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal) and subcorti-
cal (caudate nucleus, susbtantia nigra, and nucleus accumbens) re-
gions, as well as some of the regulators of this circuit (amygdala,
thalamus, hippocampus).
A number of published papers have reported activation of high-
level sensory cortex while participants rated different aesthetic
dimensions of images. Activity in occipital cortex related with po-
sitive aesthetic experiences was identified by Cupchik et al. (2009)
and Vartanian and Goel (2004), in temporal cortex by Jacobsen
et al. (2006), Lengger et al. (2007) and Yue et al. (2007), and in pari-
etal cortex by Cela-Conde et al. (2009), Fairhall and Ishai (2008),
and Lengger et al. (2007). Koelsch and Calvo-Merino’s presenta-
tions at the conference, revealed that this aspect of aesthetic expe-
rience generalizes to music and dance. Liking of musical fragments
and dance sequences is correlated with activity in brain regions re-
lated with the perception of sound and body movement.
Published neuroimaging studies have also identified activity re-
lated with evaluative judgment and attentional engagement asso-
ciated with aesthetically pleasing visual stimuli. Activation in
lateral prefrontal cortex was identified by Cela-Conde et al.,
2004, Cupchik et al. (2009), Jacobsen et al. (2006), and Lengger
et al. (2007), and in medial frontal cortex by Jacobsen et al. (2006).
Several studies have reported activation in regions related with
different aspects of affect and emotion while participants viewed
images or listened to musical fragments they rated as beautiful.
These regions are constituents of what is known as the reward
circuit or its modulators (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2009).
Orbitofrontal activation, presumably related to the representation
of reward value, was identified by Blood et al. (1999), Blood and
Zatorre (2001), Cupchik et al. (2009) and Kawabata and Zeki
(2004). Anterior cingulate activation, possibly reflecting monitor-
ing of one’s own affective state, was identified by Blood et al.
(1999) Cupchik et al. (2009) and Vartanian and Goel (2004). The
involvement of subcortical components of the reward circuit in
aesthetic experiences has been reported by Cupchik et al. (2009),
Di Dio et al. (2007), Gosselin et al. (2007), Mitterschiffthaler et al.
(2007), Vartanian and Goel (2004), and Yue et al. (2007)
.
Although evidence supporting this view of the neural mecha-
nisms underlying aesthetic appreciation seems to be accumulating,
a number of issues are raised by the findings reported in these
studies and the discrepancies among them. There are at least two
pressing issues. First, what factors are responsible for the observed
discrepancies in the results of the studies reviewed above? For in-
stance, although several studies report enhanced high-level per-
ceptual processing, different studies have identified the
enhancement variously in occipital, temporal or parietal cortices.
Nadal, Munar, Capó, Rosselló, and Cela-Conde (2008) have sug-
gested that some of these discrepancies could be explained by
the different kinds of stimuli used, different proportions of male
and female participants, different procedures and techniques, and
even different instructions and tasks to register aesthetic re-
sponses. Recent research has shown, as might be expected, that
representational stimuli engage neural mechanisms involved in
object perception much more strongly than abstract stimuli
(Fairhall & Ishai, 2008). Equally, Cupchik and colleagues (2009)
have demonstrated the effects of instructions on brain activity re-
lated with aesthetic appreciation. Further systematic research is
required to clarify the influence of these and other factors on the
neural underpinnings of aesthetic appreciation.
Second, it is becoming increasingly clear that psychological
models (Chatterjee, 2004b; Leder et al., 2004) have underspecified
affective processes involved in aesthetic appreciation. Some stud-
ies have identified activation in emotion-related brain regions,
such as the insula (Cupchik et al., 2009; Di Dio et al., 2007), others
have identified activation in regions thought to be involved in cod-
ing reward value, such as the orbitofrontal cortex (Kawabata &
Zeki, 2004; Vartanian & Goel, 2004), and others have reported acti-
vation in pleasure generating subcortical regions (Yue et al., 2007).
Furthermore, the results reported by Skov at the conference (see
also Kirk, Skov, Christensen, et al., 2009; Kirk, Skov, Hulme, et al.,
2009) have clearly shown that orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingu-
late cortex, and nucleus accumbens play distinct roles in aesthetic
appreciation. The studies presented by Skov and Ishai at the con-
ference took into account the variables of expertise, context, and
sexual preference. Their results, which showed that activation in
the orbitofrontal cortex was modulated by those factors, indicate
that this region may compute reward values resulting from inte-
grating core hedonic responses to the stimulus with contextual
and personal information. Conversely, subcortical components of
the reward circuit seem to be relatively unaffected by modulating
factors and may be responsible for the pleasurable aspect of aes-
thetic experiences. Skov’s presentation showed that the activity
of the nucleus accumbens, an essential component of the reward
circuit, was unaffected by people’s prior experience with the mate-
rials they were rating. These findings pose a challenge to research-
ers to develop ingenious experimental designs to clarify the role of
different brain regions involved in aesthetic appreciation.
Finally, it is interesting to ask to what extent these neural re-
sponses to diverse artistic forms, such as music, painting and
dance, among others, might reflect domain general emotional or
aesthetic processes. In his contribution to the conference, entitled
Aesthetic judgments of beauty, Thomas Jacobsen compared
178 M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
responses to visual art and music, and presented evidence from
two separate fMRI studies of aesthetic responses to visual and
auditory stimuli (Jacobsen et al., 2006; Kornysheva, von Cramon,
Jacobsen, & Schubotz, 2010), noting that in both cases, aesthetic
judgments generated greater activation in antero-medial and infe-
rior frontal gyrus than was produced by control tasks (visual sym-
metry and auditory tempo judgments), suggesting a modality-
independent system for the judgment of beauty. The identification
of modality-independent neural substrates of aesthetic experience
is an important topic for future research in neuroaesthetics.
9. An evolutionary perspective
In addition to asking about the neural foundations of our aes-
thetic experiences, neuroaesthetics also seeks to understand their
evolutionary history. The evolutionary origins of our capacity to
produce and appreciate beautiful art puzzled early Darwinian
thinkers, who attempted to determine the selective advantage con-
ferred by such a trait. Today there is still much disagreement about
the adaptive significance of art and aesthetic experiences. In one
approach, artistic behaviors are viewed as exaptations, exemplified
by Steven Pinker (1997) who famously suggested that music is
‘‘auditory cheesecake’’. Our preference for cheesecake derives from
an evolved preference for the fats and oils that were advantageous
to survival in the moderate quantities naturally occurring in nuts
and seeds but are disadvantageous to survival in the unlimited
quantities available to us today in artificially produced cheesecake.
Pinker argues that music is a by-product of cognitive and behav-
ioral functions adapted for language.
Others have argued that art and aesthetics have had a clear
adaptive value. But what selective advantage might aesthetic activ-
ities confer? Darwin himself, for example, suggested that music,
like birdsong, might have evolved through sexual selection to sup-
port mate choice. Acquiring the skills to produce high quality
works of art is difficult, rare and costly, so the ability to do so might
serve as an honest signal of such qualities as health, energy, crea-
tivity, access to rare materials, good learning abilities, intelligence
and coordination, among others (Miller, 2001).
Visual aesthetic preferences have also been linked to habitat
selection, assessing environments to make decisions about where
to move and settle, which is assumed to have been especially
important to our Pleistocene ancestors who were nomadic hun-
ter-gatherers (Kaplan, 1987; Orians & Heerwagen, 1992). Our aes-
thetic preferences reflect evolved preferences for habitats with
features characteristic of a high-quality tropical African savanna.
Two presentations at the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference
took an evolutionary perspective on neuroaesthetics. The argu-
ment presented by Ellen Dissanayake in her talk Proto-aesthetic re-
sponses in hominins of the early Pleistocene, began by noting that the
narrowing of the pelvis to facilitate bipedalism and the increased
brain size in erectus-grade hominins, which occurred about 1.8
million years ago, led to a shorter gestation period. Natural selec-
tion then favored strategies used by mothers to provide necessary
additional care during the ensuing altricial period. The signals used
by adults to communicate with infants are simplified or stereo-
typed, repetitive, exaggerated, elaborated in visual, vocal and kin-
esthetic ways. These features engage the infant’s attention and
generate states of anticipation and expectation. Dissanayake ar-
gued that these strategies served as a pool from which later hom-
inins could draw when they began to carry out artistic and ritual
activities. In fact, these attributes constitute essential components
of ritualization and artification behaviors observed in all human
societies.
Although Dissanayake’s views are consistent with what is
known about art in traditional non-western societies, and over-
comes some of the drawbacks of other proposals, her approach is
still hypothetical. Given the lack of fossil and archaeological evi-
dence for many of the proposed cognitive processes, it is almost
impossible to derive empirically testable predictions from the the-
ory. This remains a critical challenge for Dissanayake’s work and
for adaptive accounts of aesthetic behaviors in general which must
not degenerate into post hoc ‘just-so’ stories (Fitch, 2006).
Precisely such a transition from evolutionary theory to hypoth-
esis testing was the focus of Karl Grammer’s presentation, dis-
cussed above. Grammer reviewed how features known to
influence human beauty, such as averageness, symmetry and
sex-hormone markers, are expressed in facial and body form, skin
texture, body motion, body odor, voice, and hair, and how these
traits are related with genetic and developmental factors. Gram-
mer also addressed the question of how receivers of fitness signals
arrive at a coherent assessment based on such a multiplicity of
cues. He argued against the proposal that each feature signals dif-
ferent aspects of mate value, arguing instead that humans combine
many different signals to derive a single estimate of mate fitness
that is more reliable than any of its components. Finally, Grammer
argued against the existence of innate beauty detectors for partic-
ular representational content, proposing instead a set of innate ab-
stract rules for constructing beauty templates through experience.
10. Future challenges for neuroaesthetics
If the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference had a single short-
coming, it was the limited time for questions and debate after each
of the presentations, which is so important for opening dialogues
between scholars with such different backgrounds. As a result,
there was not enough opportunity to reach an explicit consensus
for establishing key founding principles and priorities for research
in neuroaesthetics, or to deal with some of the most frequent crit-
icisms aimed at the field. We have attempted to specify what we
believe to be some foundations for such a synthesis in previous
pages. These foundations are not necessarily exhaustive and we ex-
pect them to be revised and strengthened with further research. In
doing so, the field must listen to its critics, identify and address
those challenges that, if ignored, could become serious pitfalls.
10.1. Challenges related with the field’s internal coherence
One issue that requires immediate attention is the extent to
which neuropsychological and neuroimaging results converge.
The literature reviewed in this paper suggests that there is no sim-
ple correspondence between the two approaches. This is partly be-
cause most studies of the relation between art and brain lesions
and degeneration have concerned the production of art, while most
neuroimaging studies have attempted to identify brain activity re-
lated to the appreciation of artworks or designs. Another issue that
requires close attention is how neuroscientific and evolutionary
perspectives can contribute to each other. Evidently, knowledge
about the evolution of aesthetic appreciation is relevant to under-
standing its neural foundations, and vice versa, but the precise
ways in which the relationship can be best exploited are currently
far from obvious. Thus, neuroaesthetics faces the challenge of pro-
viding an account of aesthetic and artistic activities that integrates
results from neuroimaging, neuropsychology and evolution.
10.2. Methodological challenges
Have neuroimaging studies really registered neural activity re-
lated with aesthetic appreciation? To our knowledge none of the
studies presented in this review have included experimental con-
trol of – for instance – attentional mechanisms, and very few have
attempted to control for the affective value of the stimuli. Thus, it
remains a possibility that some of the results we have summarized
M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
179
here reflect processes that are unrelated to aesthetics, and that,
unbeknownst to researchers, their participants were actually per-
forming an attentional task, or an affective discrimination task, in-
stead of an aesthetic appreciation task. Future work needs to
develop methodological procedures aimed at identifying and con-
trolling the effects of attention and affective value of stimuli,
among other possible confounding factors, during aesthetic appre-
ciation. And the same can be said of lesion and brain degeneration
studies which, to date, have for the most part been unclear as to
the precise cognitive processes affected and the scope of the
impairment, and have rarely been accompanied by a comprehen-
sive neuropsychological assessment of the people in their samples.
Chatterjee (2011) has noted two methodological issues that are
even more problematic. First, by their experimental nature, scien-
tific approaches to aesthetics involve quantification and decompo-
sition. Experiments in empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics
usually require participants to use some sort of rating scale to
quantify some dimension of their reaction to the presented stimuli.
The validity of such a strategy rests on the supposition that aes-
thetic experience can be meaningfully decomposed and quantified,
that quantitative measures capture the essence of the aesthetic
experience, and that they do not, in fact, interfere with it. However,
the extent to which beauty, liking or preference ratings are good
characterizations of aesthetic experience remains uncertain. Chat-
terjee (2011) eloquently points to this pitfall: ‘‘Reducing compo-
nents of aesthetics to quantifiable measures risks inviting the
proverbial problem of looking for the dropped coin under the lamp
because that is where things are visible, even if the coin was
dropped elsewhere’’ (Chatterjee, 2011).
The second methodological challenge identified by Chatterjee
(2011) is to avoid relying on the reverse inference, that is, taking
brain activity as an indicator for the engagement of a specific cog-
nitive process. The field of neuroaesthetics has grown substantially
owing to a number of neuroimaging studies. However, in many
cases these studies have inferred the engagement of certain cogni-
tive or affective operations while participants were performing
aesthetic-related tasks in the scanner from identified brain activity.
This would not be a problem if the active brain region were known
to be involved only in one cognitive process. However, with very
few exceptions, this is not the case. Brain regions are recruited to
participate in a variety of cognitive processes. Poldrack’s (2006)
analysis suggests that ‘‘caution should be exercised in the use of re-
verse inference, particularly in cases where the prior belief in the
engagement of a cognitive process and selectivity of activation in
the region of interest are low’’ (Poldrack, 2006, p. 63). He does note,
however, that reverse inference can constitute a rich source of new
hypotheses that can be subsequently tested in other experiments.
Bourgeois-Gironde (2010) provides strategies to establish relations
between cognitive processes and brain activity in the field of neu-
roeconomics without having to rely heavily on reverse inference.
Similar approaches should be considered to avoid neuroaesthetics
repeatedly stumbling into this particular trap.
10.3. Challenges related with the identity and scope of the field
‘‘Neuroaesthetics is a young enough field that there seems to be
no established view of its proper subject matter’’, wrote Brown and
Dissanayake (2009, p. 43). Disagreement among presenters and
discussants at the conference as to what the main topic of neuroa-
esthetics should be and the specific issues it should address would
seem to attest to such an assertion. There was also some disagree-
ment as to the questions neuroaesthetics is not well suited to deal
with. Probably the main unresolved matter is whether neuroaes-
thetics should be limited to aesthetic experience or whether it
should – or can – address artistic activities too. We identify in
the literature four reasons to argue that neuroaesthetics is not fit
to address the arts: its almost exclusive focus on aesthetics; its
search for the general over the particular; its de-contextualized ap-
proach; and its reduction of artistic experiences to neurobiological
mechanisms.
Regarding its emphasis on aesthetic phenomena, Brown and
Dissanayake (2009) have explicitly stated that neuroaesthetics is
not well suited to deal with the whole sphere of art: ‘‘Aesthetic
emotions are unquestionably an integral part of the arts, but they
are neither necessary nor sufficient to characterize them. Thus, a
narrow focus on aesthetic responses is ultimately a distraction
from the larger picture of what the arts are about’’ (Brown &
Dissanayake, 2009, p. 54). Beauty is of little relevance to many
manifestations of art around the world and throughout history,
which may have been created to intimidate, induce sorrow, to
show a community’s grandeur, to make us reflect on our own exis-
tence, and so on. Indeed, contemporary western art includes many
instances of works that were explicitly conceived as a reaction
against the concept of beauty. Furthermore, a given artwork often
serves a multitude of purposes for different people, in different
contexts, at different times. Can neuroaesthetics grapple with the
emotional, formal, cultural, and intentional complexity inherent
in the production and perception of the arts? In taking a broad
view of aesthetics, as we have here, there is a rich seam to be
mined in drawing links between neuroaesthetics and long tradi-
tions of empirical research in the psychology of music and visual
art.
There is also the question of whether neuroaesthetics can tell us
anything new about particular works of art. Massey (2009) argues
that it cannot: ‘‘Neurology is, then, of great value in exploring the
‘how’ of aesthetic processes, if not necessarily the ‘why’ or the
‘what for,’ or in helping to decide whether one work of art is of
greater value than another’’ (Massey, 2009, p. 18). Tallis (2008a)
goes further in dismissing neuroaesthetics as an extreme expres-
sion of ‘‘the faith of neuroscientism’’ (belief that the contents of hu-
man consciousness can be explained in terms of neural activation):
‘‘[Neuroaesthetics] casts no light on the specific nature of the ob-
jects and experiences of art or the distinctive contribution of indi-
vidual artists. Nor does it offer any basis for the evaluation of art as
great, good, or bad. In short, neuroaesthetics bypasses everything
that art criticism is about’’ (Tallis, 2008a, p. 19). While this might
be a defensible critique at present, it is perhaps not surprising that
a field of endeavor still within its first decade has yet to address
major questions that have occupied researchers in philosophical
aesthetics and the humanities for hundreds of years. Conversely,
it seems likely that empirical aesthetics as a whole has much to
gain from greater interaction with its philosophical cousin.
Neuroaesthetics is also charged with de-contextualizing stimuli
and participants. Given the procedural constraints imposed by
neuroimaging methodology, experimenters have tended to present
long successions of stimuli, with little contextual information, to
large groups of participants. The environment is often less than
conducive to aesthetic experience and we seek effects that we
can generalize reliably and confidently to a population of individ-
uals. ‘‘Paintings are treated as mere isolated stimuli or sets of stim-
uli. [ ] The works and our experiences of them are divorced from
their cultural context, and from the viewer’s individual history’’
(Tallis, 2008a, p. 20). These issues certainly present challenges to
which we return to below when considering the external validity
of the field.
Finally, it has been argued that aesthetic experience cannot be
reduced to an explanation in terms of neurobiological mechanisms
involved in many activities completely unrelated to art, some even
shared with other animals. In doing so one fails to explain what
distinguishes the characteristically human experience of great
works of art from everyday perceptual experiences: ‘‘Tickling up
the mirror neurones does not explain why Donne’s stanzas should
180 M. Nadal, M.T. Pearce /Brain and Cognition 76 (2011) 172–183
have the particularly intense effect they (sometimes) do’’ (Tallis,
2008b). There is a legitimate debate to be had about the veracity
of this statement but, whatever the outcome, it is undeniable that
Donne’s stanzas would have no effect whatsoever were it not for
the activity of neurons and neurotransmitters in particular brain
networks of a particular reader. As neuroscientists, it behooves
us to investigate these necessary biological conditions for aesthetic
experience. The question is to what extent these investigations can
be informed by, and contribute to, questions raised about the arts
in humanities research.
Can neuroaesthetics, with its reductionist scientific approach,
make any headway in understanding art? We believe that a posi-
tive answer to this question can only be possible if neuroaestheti-
cians accept the fact that if they reduce aesthetic experience to
simplified decontextualised laboratory tasks, they cannot expect
results obtained over a population of individuals to a collection
of artworks to predict – and explain – every possible aesthetic
experience outside of the laboratory. Advances in neuroaesthetics
have been hampered by grand claims that most art can be ac-
counted for largely in terms of the operation of specific neural
mechanisms (Hyman, 2010). The fact that researchers are now able
to identify the activation of brain regions during the experience of
a work of art is certainly not the end of the story. We have only be-
gun to scratch the surface and the issues reviewed above must cer-
tainly be borne in mind when digging deeper.
10.4. Challenges related with the field’s external coherence
Given neuroaesthetics’ interdisciplinary nature, a conscious ef-
fort is required to establish fluid interactions with neighboring dis-
ciplines. While relations with psychology, neuroscience and
evolutionary biology are more or less functional, the relation be-
tween neuroaesthetics and the traditional humanities (aesthetics,
art theory, musicology, literary criticism and so on) can be some-
what strained, on account of important discrepancies between
their approaches: ‘‘the aesthetic and scientific approaches to
describing the arts represent two different kinds of thinking’’ (Mas-
sey, 2009, p. 22). On the one hand, the scientific approach to aes-
thetics, whether in the tradition of Fechner and Berlyne’s
empirical approach or in the form of more more recent develop-
ments in neuroaesthetics, usually seeks to develop and test general
hypotheses which can predict responses across individuals, con-
texts and experiences. On the other hand, studies in the humanities
often focus on detailed formal, stylistic, iconographic and critical
aspects – among others – of a particular work that afford the edu-
cated reader a full appreciation of the author’s analysis. In this ap-
proach, there may be many valid ways of experiencing a work of
art and to average out differences between individuals so as to
maximize the commonalities would be to lose what makes a par-
ticular analysis unique and distinctive.
Also empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics aim for objective
analysis: making observations that can be reproduced and verified
intersubjectively. However, the subjectivity of individual experi-
ence (many aspects of which are yet to be fully understood in psy-
chological and neural terms) is the very essence of the humanistic
exploration of art and aesthetics. According to Massey (2009), sci-
ence is unable, in principle, to access aesthetic experience because
‘‘Immersion in the phenomenology of an experience, even for the
purpose of thinking about it, rules out the distance implied by a
scientific perspective, with its pragmatic, experimental, or mathe-
matical criteria of value.’’ (Massey, 2009, p. 185).
Research in neuroaesthetics must examine whether the gen-
eral-particular and objective-subjective barriers are insurmount-
able in principle, or whether they can be overcome. The best we
can say at present is that we see these barriers and are trying to
peek over them.
10.5. Challenges related with the field’s future research avenues
In addition to the many issues already raised throughout the
paper, one of the future directions neuroaesthetics must explore
is the time course of brain activation related with aesthetic experi-
ences. Researchers need to move beyond mere localization of brain
areas engaged in such experiences to produce a dynamic view of
neural processes. This is almost self-evidently true in the case of
music and dance but also applies to the appreciation of visual art
and architecture. Another important issue for future research is
the identification of genuine modality-independent processes –
distinct from modality-specific ones – involved in artistic and aes-
thetic appreciation involving different sensory modalities, such as
music, dance, painting, and so on. Finally, a range of different ap-
proaches including developmental, comparative, cross-cultural
and neurobiological methods must be taken to develop an empir-
ical understanding of the evolutionary origins of artistic and aes-
thetic behaviors.
11. Final remarks
Any flourishing field of scientific endeavor must have a regular
forum to allow researchers to meet and debate directly: the
Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference fulfilled this role admirably.
Here we have tried to summarize the main themes of theconference
and put them in a broader context by sketching out a framework for
understanding neuroaesthetics research in terms of its historical
background, scope and methods. We have attempted to synthesize
from the existing state of knowledge some foundational principles
for the field and some key pitfalls and challenges for future research.
The exchange of ideas in this new but blossoming field has also
benefited greatly from
Skov and Vartanian’s (2009b) volume Neu-
roaesthetics, a broad compendium of thoughtful – and often
thought-provoking – chapters addressing many of the field’s cru-
cial issues. For a young field facing many exciting challenges, there
is no doubt that both conference and book will be regarded as
foundation stones of neuroaesthetics in years to come.
Acknowledgments
Marcos Nadal was supported by research grant SEJ2007-64374/
PSIC from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. Marcus
Pearce was supported by The Wellcome Trust and by the UK Engi-
neering and Physical Sciences Research Council via research Grant
EP/H01294X/1.
The authors are grateful to Anjan Chatterjee, Martin Skov, Oshin
Vartanian and Dahlia Zaidel for helpful comments on a previous
version of this manuscript.
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