Laboratory for Experimental Ophthalmology, School for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2012;7(2):e31248. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031248. Epub 2012 Feb 22.
How do external stimuli and our internal state coalesce to create the distinctive aesthetic pleasures that give vibrance to human experience? Neuroaesthetics has so far focused on the neural correlates of observing beautiful stimuli compared to neutral or ugly stimuli, or on neural correlates of judging for beauty as opposed to other judgments. Our group questioned whether this approach is sufficient. In our view, a brain region that assesses beauty should show beauty-level-dependent activation during the beauty judgment task, but not during other, unrelated tasks. We therefore performed an fMRI experiment in which subjects judged visual textures for beauty, naturalness and roughness. Our focus was on finding brain activation related to the rated beauty level of the stimuli, which would take place exclusively during the beauty judgment. An initial whole-brain analysis did not reveal such interactions, yet a number of the regions showing main effects of the judgment task or the beauty level of stimuli were selectively sensitive to beauty level during the beauty task. Of the regions that were more active during beauty judgments than roughness judgments, the frontomedian cortex and the amygdala demonstrated the hypothesized interaction effect, while the posterior cingulate cortex did not. The latter region, which only showed a task effect, may play a supporting role in beauty assessments, such as attending to one's internal state rather than the external world. Most of the regions showing interaction effects of judgment and beauty level correspond to regions that have previously been implicated in aesthetics using different stimulus classes, but based on either task or beauty effects alone. The fact that we have now shown that task-stimulus interactions are also present during the aesthetic judgment of visual textures implies that these areas form a network that is specifically devoted to aesthetic assessment, irrespective of the stimulus type.
外部刺激和我们的内部状态如何融合在一起,创造出赋予人类体验活力的独特审美愉悦?神经美学迄今为止一直专注于观察美丽刺激物与中性或丑陋刺激物相比的神经相关性,或者专注于对美的判断与对其他判断的神经相关性。我们的研究小组质疑这种方法是否足够。在我们看来,评估美的大脑区域在进行美的判断任务时应该表现出与美相关的激活,但在其他不相关的任务中则不会。因此,我们进行了一项 fMRI 实验,让被试者判断视觉纹理的美、自然性和粗糙度。我们的重点是找到与刺激物评定美相关的大脑激活,这种激活仅在美的判断任务中发生。最初的全脑分析并未显示出这种相互作用,但一些表现出判断任务或刺激物美水平主要效应的区域在美的任务中对美水平具有选择性敏感性。在美感判断比粗糙度判断更活跃的区域中,前额皮质和杏仁核表现出假设的相互作用效应,而后扣带皮质则没有。后一个区域仅显示出任务效应,它可能在美感评估中发挥支持作用,例如关注自己的内部状态而不是外部世界。表现出判断和美感水平相互作用的大多数区域与先前使用不同刺激类别的美学研究中涉及的区域相对应,但这些区域仅基于任务或美感效应。我们现在已经表明,在视觉纹理的审美判断过程中也存在任务-刺激相互作用,这意味着这些区域形成了一个专门用于审美评估的网络,而与刺激类型无关。