Marcos Nadal

Human preferences for visual features such as curvature, visual structure, biological motion, and color have rarely been studied from a comparative perspective, and are often interpreted as reflecting distinctively human aesthetic processes. We review evidence from primates, birds, fish, and insects showing that comparable preferences are widespread across animal species. These preferences often emerge early, sometimes without prior exposure, but remain highly flexible: they are shaped by developmental trajectories, experience, behavioral goals, multisensory input, physiological state, and ecological context. Mechanistic evidence suggests that these preferences emerge from interactions between species-specific sensory tuning and higher-order neural systems involved in attention, valuation, and action. These preferences help orient behavior toward ecologically relevant features of the environment, supporting foraging, oviposition, social attachment, and social learning. Together, these findings challenge the view that human visual preferences reflect uniquely human aesthetic processes. Instead, they suggest that such preferences are better understood as flexible outputs of perceptual and motivational systems that are widely distributed across species and have been reshaped by human evolution, development, and culture.

We examined how familiarity with low or high complexity images influences complexity, liking and understanding judgments. Participants were first familiarized with either low or high complexity images. They then rated a set of intermediately complex images on perceived complexity, liking, and understanding. Data were analyzed using Bayesian mixed-effects models, controlling for declarative art knowledge, art interest, and visual art recognition. Participants familiarized with high complexity images rated intermediately complex images as less complex, indicating a contrast effect. Higher declarative art knowledge was linked to increased complexity ratings. Additionally, liking judgments were predicted by complexity ratings, especially among participants familiarized with simpler images, revealing that prior exposure shapes the relationship between complexity and liking. In contrast, understanding judgments were unaffected by complexity ratings or familiarization. These findings highlight the role of prior exposure in shaping visual complexity judgments, demonstrating how familiarity with certain complexity levels recalibrates perceptual baselines and influences subsequent evaluative judgments.

Visual complexity is a key factor in perceptual and evaluative judgments. People's representation of visual complexity is constructed from quantitative and structural image features, but it is also influenced by familiarity and expertise. We examined how people represent visual complexity and its impact on perception and evaluation, focusing on information about paintings and their affective valence on judgments of visual complexity, liking and understanding. Seventy‐six participants rated 60 representational artworks of negative, neutral, and positive valence on complexity, beauty and understanding. Half of the participants received written information about each artwork. Results showed that negative artworks were judged as more complex than neutral artworks and positive ones, but this effect was attenuated by the provided information. Liking judgments increased with judged complexity, were higher for positive artworks than neutral ones, for neutral than negative ones, and were higher when information was provided. Understanding judgments were higher for positive artworks than neutral ones, and higher for neutral artworks than negatively valenced ones. Information increased understanding only for negative artworks, and judged complexity did not affect these judgments. In sum, the representation of the visual complexity of an image is influenced by its valence and the available information, modulating judgments of complexity and liking, but not of understanding.

Can art improve health and wellbeing? The rapidly growing art therapy literature claims that there is solid evidence that engaging with art ameliorates mental and physical disorders and increases wellbeing. This claim is used to justify numerous arts-based clinical interventions and health policies, so it deserves thorough scrutiny. Here we show that the evidence cited in favor of the efficacy of art therapy interventions is conceptually and methodologically flawed. Conceptually, experiments investigating the effects of arts-based interventions on health do not include appropriate tests nor control conditions that would allow demonstrating that the putative effects actually owe to the healing power of art: (i) they fail to define what art is, making it impossible to compare the effect of “art” and “non-art” stimuli and activities on health and wellbeing; (ii) they fail to demonstrate that “art” stimuli and activities elicit a distinct class of “art” experiences that modulate the mechanistic causes of disorders; (iii) and they fail to include causal manipulations of physiological processes believed to be mechanisms of action that could prove that art-induced processes affect the etiology of disorders. Methodologically, most studies cited as proof for the efficacy of art therapy lacked such common clinical trial procedures as defining the therapeutic agent, randomizing group assignment, controlling for patient or researcher allegiance, controlling for the effects of other concurrent interventions and medications, comparing art-based interventions to other kinds of interventions, or conducting and reporting statistical analyses appropriately. We conclude that there is no compelling evidence that art objects and activities can induce physiological changes to the human nervous system that result in health improvements and wellbeing. We discuss why proponents of art therapy have neglected these problems and the ethical implications for patients who are treated using art therapy.

The concept of disinterestedness has played a pivotal role in the establishment of philosophical aesthetics. The idea that certain aesthetic object qualities can only be appreciated through the application of a special power of aesthetic appraisal was founded on the claim that such appraisals are without interest in the practical or adaptive use of the object. Similarly, the notion that the “satisfaction” that arises from this type of appraisal is a distinct form of pleasure was grounded on the claim that the function of aesthetic pleasure is to signal the delight of “mere” contemplation, not to promote the possession of the object. We trace how these philosophical ideas gave rise to the psychological and neuroscientific hypothesis that the human brain is endowed with a specialized set of processing routines that allow for the aesthetic evaluation of sensory objects, the result of which is the generation of a pleasure that is devoid of motivational stance. We then review evidence from experiments that have tested this hypothesis. Results from these studies show that tasks and stimuli that are thought to track aesthetic evaluation engage the same neural processes as other types of hedonic evaluation, indicating that they are not fundamentally different, and elicit pleasure states and motivational signals driving behavior that are equally shared with other types of hedonic evaluation, suggesting that there is nothing “disinterested” about aesthetic evaluations. We discuss the implications of these experimental findings.

Over the last two decades, neuroscientific research has considerably advanced our understanding of the neurobiological processes that underlie our interactions with artworks. Through a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging methods, experiments have identified sensory, perceptual, emotional and cognitive processes that make important contributions to our psychological experiences of art, in particular the emergence of aesthetic preferences. Here we conduct a selective review of this literature that will provide readers without a background in the neurosciences a first introduction into what we have learned so far. Our review is organised in three parts: First we describe research that has examined neurobiologicalprocesses involved in the sensation and perception of art. Next, we survey findings that cast light on the neural mechanisms underlying our emotional responses to art, including the contribution of the mesocorticolimbic reward circuitry to the computation of aesthetic liking. Third, we outline how cognitive processes associated with expectations, knowledge and expertise significantly influence our response to works of art. We conclude the chapter by discussing how the experience of art relies on an interdependence of sensation, emotion, and cognition, and how the major challenge of future neuroaesthetics research lies in improving our understanding of the complex interplay of these neural processes.