Gisèle Marty

Visual Complexity and Beauty Appreciation: Explaining the Divergence of Results:

Although a number of studies have verified Daniel Berlynes (1971) predicted maximum preference for intermediately complex stimuli, others have found that preference increased or decreased in relation to complexity. The objective of the present work was to assess whether differences in the kinds of stimuli used in prior studies or in the way complexity was defined could explain this divergence. In the first phase a set of 120 stimuli varying in complexity, abstraction, and artistry was assembled. In the second phase 94 participants were asked to rate the beauty of the stimuli. In the final phase the same participants rated 60 of the stimuli on seven complexity dimensions. We failed to detect any meaningful influence of complexity on beauty ratings for any of the kinds of stimuli. However, our results suggest that there are three different forms of complexity that contribute to peoples perception of visual complexity: one related with the amount and variety of elements, another related with the way those elements are organized, and asymmetry. We suggest that each of these types of complexity influences beauty ratings in different ways, and that the unresolved relation between complexity and beauty appreciation is mainly due to differences in the conception, manipulation, and measurement of visual complexity.

Lateral orbitofrontal cortex involvement in initial negative aesthetic impression formation

It is well established that aesthetic appreciation is related with activity in several different brain regions. The identification of the neural correlates of beauty or liking ratings has been the focus of most prior studies. Not much attention has been directed towards the fact that humans are surrounded by objects that lead them to experience aesthetic indifference or leave them with a negative aesthetic impression. Here we explore the neural substrate of such experiences. Given the neuroimaging techniques that have been used, little is known about the temporal features of such brain activity. By means of magnetoencephalography we registered the moment at which brain activity differed while participants viewed images they considered to be beautiful or not. Results show that the first differential activity appears between 300 and 400 ms after stimulus onset. During this period activity in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) was greater while participants rated visual stimuli as not beautiful than when they rated them as beautiful. We argue that this activity is associated with an initial negative aesthetic impression formation, driven by the relative hedonic value of stimuli regarded as not beautiful. Additionally, our results contribute to the understanding of the nature of the functional roles of the lOFC.

THE 'STYLE SCHEME' GROUNDS PERCEPTION OF PAINTINGS

We studied the formation of style scheme (identification of the style that characterizes an artist) presenting 100 participants aesthetic visual stimuli. Participants were Spanish university students who volunteered: 72 women, 28 men of mean age 22.8 yr. Among those 50 were enrolled in History of Art and 50 students in Psychology. Stimuli belonged to different categories—High Art (pictures of well-known artists, like Van Gogh)/Popular Art (decorative pictures like Christmas postcards) and Representational (pictures with explicit meaning content, like a landscape)/Abstract (pictures without explicit meaning content, like Pollocks colored stains). Analysis using Signal Detection Theory techniques focused on how participants discriminate representational and abstract pictures. With High An stimuli, participants can better discriminate representational paintings than abstract ones. However, the difference in discrimination between representational and abstract pictures diminishes among participants studying History of Art. It seems that prior education in art favors forming style schemes and to some extent enables the participant to detect the “meaning” in High Art abstract paintings.

The Search for Objective Measures of Aesthetic Judgment: The Case of Memory Traces:

Verbal responses have frequently been used to measure aesthetic experience. They usually take the form of semantic judgments regarding specific aspects or dimensions of certain stimuli. The use of this kind of technique has produced a great amount of knowledge, but its combination with objective procedures can increase the validity and reliability of measurement. In this study, we set out to assess whether memory traces can serve as an objective control element for subjective aesthetic judgments. We analyzed the relation between aesthetic judgment and recognition of High Art and Popular Art visual stimuli by participants with and without formal art education. Results show that participants tended to give higher pleasantness and beauty ratings to those stimuli that have left a strong memory trace. Lower scores were awarded to stimuli they did not recognize well. However, originality and interest ratings did not follow the same trend. This disparity is discussed in relation to the dimensionality of aesthetic experience and the influence of formal art education on subjective measures of aesthetic experience.

Mind Architecture and Brain Architecture

The use of the computer metaphor has led to the proposal of ’’mind architecture‘‘ (Pylyshyn 1984; Newell 1990) as a model of the organization of the mind. The dualist computational model, however, has, since the earliest days of psychological functionalism, required that the concepts ’’mind architecture‘‘ and ’’brain architecture‘‘ be remote from each other. The development of both connectionism and neurocomputational science, has sought to dispense with this dualism and provide general models of consciousness – a ’’uniform cognitive architecture‘‘ –, which is in general reductionist, but which retains the computer metaphor. This paper examines, in the first place, the concepts of mind architecture and brain architecture, in order to evaluate the syntheses which have recently been offered. It then moves on to show how modifications which have been made to classical functionalist mind architectures, with the aim of making them compatible with brain architectures, are unable to resolve some of the most serious problems of functionalism. Some suggestions are given as to why it is not possible to relate mind structures and brain structures by using neurocomputational approaches, and finally the question is raised of the validity of reductionism in a theory which sets out to unite mind and brain architectures.

Estética experimental: pintura. Procesamiento de estímulos estéticos

Resumen Este trabajo presenta algunos experimentos de una amplia investigación realizada en el campo de la estética experimental. La influencia de la educación artística en la huella de memoria producida por distintos tipos de estímulos estéticos, la relación entre los juicios estéticos y la familiaridad de los estímulos y el uso de las técnicas de neuroimagen son los principales aspectos estudiados.

Ley, voluntad y predicción

ResumenLa prediccion de acontecimient os futuros difiere en los mundos fisico, biologico y cognitivo. La cantidad de impredecibilidad aumenta de uno a otro y descansa en diferentes mecanismos. Pero al amrgen d cual sea el mecanismo propuesto para explicar la impredecibilidad—“voluntad” “intencion”—debe tener en cuenta el problema de la reduccion y de la validez de las leyes a traves de los procesos de emergencia Se discute aqui la validez de las diferencias operacionales para caracterizar la impredecibilidad biologica y cognitiva.