Neuroaesthetics

Abstract

Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within cognitive neuroscience that is concerned with understanding the biological bases of aesthetic experiences. These experiences involve appraisals of natural objects, artifacts, and environments. Because aesthetic encounters are common in everyday life, exploration of their biological bases can deepen our understanding of human behavior in important domains such as mate selection, consumer behavior, communication, and art. We review recent evidence showing that aesthetic experiences emerge from the interaction between sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge neural systems. Neuroaesthetics draws from and informs traditional areas of cognitive neuroscience including perception, emotion, semantics, attention, and decision-making. The discipline is at a historical inflection point and is poised to enter the mainstream of scientific inquiry.