Do we enjoy what we sense and perceive? A dissociation between aesthetic appreciation and basic perception of environmental objects or events

Abstract

This integrative review rearticulates the notion of human aesthetics by critically appraising the conventional definitions, offerring a new, more comprehensive definition, and identifying the fundamental components associated with it. It intends to advance holistic understanding of the notion by differentiating aesthetic perception from basic perceptual recognition, and by characterizing these concepts from the perspective of information processing in both visual and nonvisual modalities. To this end, we analyze the dissociative nature of information processing in the brain, introducing a novel local-global integrative model that differentiates aesthetic processing from basic perceptual processing. This model builds on the current state of the art in visual aesthetics as well as newer propositions about nonvisual aesthetics. This model comprises two analytic channels: aesthetics-only channel and perception-to-aesthetics channel. The aesthetics-only channel primarily involves restricted local processing for quality or richness (e.g., attractiveness, beauty/prettiness, elegance, sublimeness, catchiness, hedonic value) analysis, whereas the perception-to-aesthetics channel involves global/extended local processing for basic feature analysis, followed by restricted local processing for quality or richness analysis. We contend that aesthetic processing operates independently of basic perceptual processing, but not independently of cognitive processing. We further conjecture that there might be a common faculty, labeled as aesthetic cognition faculty, in the human brain for all sensory aesthetics albeit other parts of the brain can also be activated because of basic sensory processing prior to aesthetic processing, particularly during the operation of the second channel. This generalized model can account not only for simple and pure aesthetic experiences but for partial and complex aesthetic experiences as well.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Affect; Attention; Beauty-dependent; Blindness; Cognition; Crossmodal; Dissociation; Independence; Modality; Neural substrates; Nonvisual; Perception; Task-dependent; Top-down, Bottom-up; Visual.

Fig. 1

A dual-channel model that differentiates aesthetic processing from basic perceptual or recognition processing in the visual modality. The first channel (route ABC), the Aesthetics-only channel, involves restricted local processing to analyze the quality or richness of sensory inputs under top-down and bottom-up controls in the absence of stimulus recognition (i.e., when recognition is not necessary or failure of recognition occurs). The second channel, the Perception-to-Aesthetics channel, operates in two consecutive stages: a basic perceptual stage and an aesthetic stage. The basic perceptual stage (routes ADE) involves either global-to-local or local-to-global processing under top-down and bottom-up controls to analyze the basic physical distinguishing features of sensory inputs for an accurate recognition or meaningful representation of the percept. The aesthetic stage (routes EDBC) which operates concurrently or immediately after the perceptual stage involves restricted local processing. This latter one is perhaps a one-way stage which does not typically operate when the task is purely perceptual or recognition. The two cognition (aesthetic cognition and basic cognition) faculties in the model are different at functional level but not necessarily at neural level. There are reciprocal interactions between aesthetic emotion and aesthetic cognition and between perception and basic cognition. The brain regions modulating these cognitive functions are not necessarily universal; rather, they do vary across sensory modalities, and across the properties of sensory inputs within a sensory modality

Fig. 2

Ishizu and Zeki’s hypothetical neural scheme for aesthetic and perceptual judgments of paintings. The system to the left (anterior insula, dlPFC, and IPS) is involved in both brightness (perceptual–cognitive) and beauty (affective–aesthetic) judgments, whereas that to the right (mOFC and iOFC) is involved in aesthetic judgment only. The two motor pathways involved in both kinds of judgments (PMC and SMA) are shown to the left, and the motor structures involved in affective judgment alone (basal ganglia and cerebellar vermis) are shown to the right (after Ishizu & Zeki, 2013)

Fig. 3

Functional organization of brain regions involved in aesthetic and basic perception in visual and tactile modalities of healthy sighted humans (summarized and integrated from different studies as outlined in the text, but these are not exhaustive)