Aleem Hassan, Correa-Herran Ivan, Grzywacz Norberto M
Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown UniversityWashington, DC, USA; Facultad de Artes, Universidad Nacional de ColombiaBogotá, Colombia.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2017 Mar 9;11:94. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00094. eCollection 2017.
The Processing Fluency Theory posits that the ease of sensory information processing in the brain facilitates esthetic pleasure. Accordingly, the theory would predict that master painters should display biases toward visual properties such as symmetry, balance, and moderate complexity. Have these biases been occurring and if so, have painters been optimizing these properties (fluency variables)? Here, we address these questions with statistics of portrait paintings from the Early Renaissance period. To do this, we first developed different computational measures for each of the aforementioned fluency variables. Then, we measured their statistics in 153 portraits from 26 master painters, in 27 photographs of people in three controlled poses, and in 38 quickly snapped photographs of individual persons. A statistical comparison between Early Renaissance portraits and quickly snapped photographs revealed that painters showed a bias toward balance, symmetry, and moderate complexity. However, a comparison between portraits and controlled-pose photographs showed that painters did not optimize each of these properties. Instead, different painters presented biases toward different, narrow ranges of fluency variables. Further analysis suggested that the painters' individuality stemmed in part from having to resolve the tension between complexity vs. symmetry and balance. We additionally found that constraints on the use of different painting materials by distinct painters modulated these fluency variables systematically. In conclusion, the Processing Fluency Theory of Esthetic Pleasure would need expansion if we were to apply it to the history of visual art since it cannot explain the lack of optimization of each fluency variables. To expand the theory, we propose the existence of a Neuroesthetic Space, which encompasses the possible values that each of the fluency variables can reach in any given art period. We discuss the neural mechanisms of this Space and propose that it has a distributed representation in the human brain. We further propose that different artists reside in different, small sub-regions of the Space. This Neuroesthetic-Space hypothesis raises the question of how painters and their paintings evolve across art periods.
加工流畅性理论认为，大脑中感觉信息处理的难易程度会促进审美愉悦。因此，该理论预测，绘画大师应该对诸如对称、平衡和适度复杂性等视觉属性表现出偏好。这些偏好是否一直存在？如果存在，画家们是否一直在优化这些属性（流畅性变量）？在这里，我们通过对文艺复兴早期肖像画的统计来回答这些问题。为此，我们首先为上述每个流畅性变量开发了不同的计算方法。然后，我们测量了26位绘画大师的153幅肖像画、三种受控姿势下的27张人物照片以及38张个人快速抓拍照片中的这些变量的统计数据。文艺复兴早期肖像画与快速抓拍照片之间的统计比较表明，画家们对平衡、对称和适度复杂性表现出偏好。然而，肖像画与受控姿势照片之间的比较表明，画家们并没有优化这些属性中的每一个。相反，不同的画家对不同的、狭窄范围的流畅性变量表现出偏好。进一步的分析表明，画家的个性部分源于必须解决复杂性与对称和平衡之间的矛盾。我们还发现，不同画家对不同绘画材料使用的限制会系统地调节这些流畅性变量。总之，如果我们要将审美愉悦的加工流畅性理论应用于视觉艺术史，该理论需要扩展，因为它无法解释每个流畅性变量缺乏优化的情况。为了扩展该理论，我们提出存在一个神经美学空间，它包含了每个流畅性变量在任何给定艺术时期可能达到的值。我们讨论了这个空间的神经机制，并提出它在人类大脑中有分布式表征。我们进一步提出，不同的艺术家位于这个空间的不同小区域。这个神经美学空间假说提出了画家及其绘画作品如何在不同艺术时期演变的问题。
