Activation of the Prefrontal Cortex in the Human Visual Aesthetic Perception

Overview

Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Specialty Science

Date 2004 Apr 14

PMID 15079079

Citations 79

Authors

Camilo J Cela-Conde

Gisele Marty

Fernando Maestu

Tomas Ortiz

Enric Munar

Alberto Fernandez

Miquel Roca

Jaume Rossello

Felipe Quesney

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Visual aesthetic perception ("aesthetics") or the capacity to visually perceive a particular attribute added to other features of objects, such as form, color, and movement, was fixed during human evolutionary lineage as a trait not shared with any great ape. Although prefrontal brain expansion is mentioned as responsible for the appearance of such human trait, no current knowledge exists on the role of prefrontal areas in the aesthetic perception. The visual brain consists of "several parallel multistage processing systems, each specialized in a given task such as, color or motion" [Bartels, A. & Zeki, S. (1999) Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. B 265, 2327-2332]. Here we report the results of an experiment carried out with magnetoencephalography which shows that the prefrontal area is selectively activated in humans during the perception of objects qualified as "beautiful" by the participants. Therefore, aesthetics can be hypothetically considered as an attribute perceived by means of a particular brain processing system, in which the prefrontal cortex seems to play a key role.

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