Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.
University of California, San Francisco, USA.
Cogn Process. 2021 Sep;22(Suppl 1):115-120. doi: 10.1007/s10339-021-01043-4. Epub 2021 Aug 27.
People in developed countries spend over 90% of their time in built environments. Yet, we know little about its pervasive and often hidden effects on our mental state and our brain. Despite growing interest in the neuroscience of architecture, much of this scholarship has been descriptive. The typical approach is to map knowledge of the brain onto constructs important to architecture. For a programmatic line of research, how might descriptive neuroarchitecture be transformed into an experimental science? We review the literature outlining how one might consider experimental architecture first by examining the role of natural features in architectural settings. We then turn to the human experience of occupants, and hypothesized that aesthetic responses to architectural interiors reduce to key psychological dimensions. Conducting Psychometric Network Analysis (PNA) and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) on responses to curated images, we identified three components: coherence (ease of organizing and comprehending a scene), fascination (informational richness and generated interest), and hominess (personal ease and comfort). Coherence and fascination are well-established dimensions for natural scenes. Hominess was a new dimension related to architectural interiors. Central to all three communities in the PNA was emotional valence. We also reanalyzed data from an earlier fMRI study in which participants made beauty and approach-avoidance decisions while viewing the same images. Regardless of task, the degree of fascination covaried with neural activity in the right lingual gyrus. In contrast, coherence covaried with neural activity in the left inferior occipital gyrus only when participants judged beauty, and hominess covaried with neural activity in the left cuneus only when they made approach-avoidance decisions. The visual brain harbours hidden sensitivities to architectural interiors that are captured by the dimensions of coherence, fascination, and hominess. These findings represent first steps towards an experimental neuroarchitecture.
发达国家的人有超过 90%的时间在人工环境中度过。然而，我们对其对我们的精神状态和大脑的普遍而又常常隐藏的影响知之甚少。尽管神经建筑学的研究兴趣日益浓厚，但其中的大部分都是描述性的。典型的方法是将对大脑的认识映射到对建筑学很重要的概念上。对于一个计划性的研究项目，描述性神经建筑学如何能够转变为实验科学？我们首先通过检查自然特征在建筑环境中的作用来审查概述如何首先考虑实验建筑的文献。然后，我们转向居住者的人类体验，并假设对建筑内部的审美反应可以简化为关键的心理维度。通过对精选图像的心理物理网络分析（PNA）和主成分分析（PCA），我们确定了三个组成部分：连贯性（组织和理解场景的容易程度）、吸引力（信息丰富度和产生的兴趣）和宜居性（个人轻松和舒适）。连贯性和吸引力是自然场景的成熟维度。宜居性是与建筑内部相关的新维度。PNA 中的所有三个社区的核心都是情绪效价。我们还重新分析了来自早期 fMRI 研究的数据，在该研究中，参与者在观看相同图像时做出了美感和回避决策。无论任务如何，吸引力的程度都与右侧舌回的神经活动相关。相比之下，只有当参与者判断美感时，连贯性才与左侧枕下回的神经活动相关，而宜居性仅与左侧楔前叶的神经活动相关，只有当他们做出回避决策时才相关。视觉大脑对建筑内部隐藏着敏感性，这些敏感性可以通过连贯性、吸引力和宜居性的维度来捕捉。这些发现代表了迈向实验神经建筑学的第一步。
