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Description
What does it mean to perceive the world from an aesthetic attitude? This concept refers to a distinct mode of perception and engagement, characterized by focused attention, emotional sensitivity, and openness to the sensory and affective qualities of objects—often facilitating an aesthetic experience.
In this neuroimaging study, we sought to identify the neural correlates of the aesthetic attitude across a range of stimulus types. To trigger this particular mode of processing, participants were asked to dwell on and rate the beauty of three categories of stimuli: natural objects with biological relevance (faces), natural but biologically irrelevant objects (butterflies), and a human-created artform (piano broken chords). These beauty evaluations were contrasted with a non-aesthetic task in which participants rated shape-related features of the same stimuli (facial roundness, butterfly wing aspect ratio, arpeggio velocity).
This design allowed us to probe both domain-specific and domain-general neural mechanisms underlying an aesthetic attitude.