Commentary: Neural substrates of embodied natural beauty and social endowed beauty: An fMRI study

摘要

The use of neuroimaging techniques to study aesthetic valuation has invigorated scientific aesthetics (Chatterjee, 2011 ; Nadal and Pearce, 2011 ). These techniques have improved our understanding of the relation between psychological processes involved in aesthetic valuation and the underlying neural mechanisms, they have made it possible to study cognitive or affective processes unaccompanied by overt behavioral responses, and they have provided crucial constraints on cognitive theories and models (Pearce et al., 2016 ). Not only have neuroimaging techniques led to new questions about aesthetics, they have produced new evidence capable of settling old debates.In this vein, Zhang et al. ( 2017 ) recently used fMRI to explore the dispute between objectivist and subjectivist philosophies of beauty: Is beauty a quality of objects or a quality we attribute to objects? They asked participants to judge unfamiliar ancient Chinese characters as beautiful or ugly. Half of the characters were pictographs, referring to concrete objects and outlining their shape. The other half were ideographic symbols, referring to abstract social concepts. The authors assumed that beauty judgments of pictographs were based on their objective features, and beauty judgments of ideographs on their subjective socially constructed meanings.Zhang et al. ( 2017 ) found widespread brain activity common to judgments of both sorts of characters, but they also found activity in certain brain regions specific either to judging the beauty of pictographs or judging the beauty of ideographs. They saw in these specific patterns the neural signatures of two distinct kinds of beauty, one related to object features and another to subjective processes. Zhang et al. ( 2017 ) argued that their results constitute evidence for a sense of beauty that responds to two different kinds of attributes: objective features (“embodied natural beauty”), and subjective social constructions (“social endowed beauty”).However, motivated by their assumption that pictographs are judged for their objective features and ideographs for their subjective social meanings, Zhang et al. ( 2017 ) overlooked the most parsimonious interpretation of their results. Differences in brain activity related to the beauty judgments of pictographs and ideographs most probably owe to the former being representational and the latter being abstract. That the characters differed in abstraction is a matter of fact: they were chosen so. That they differed as to the source of their beauty is a matter of unsupported speculation: the objective features of ideographs and the meanings of pictographs can also be judged as beautiful or ugly. Zhang et al. ( 2017 ), thus, did not identify brain activity corresponding to “embodied natural beauty” and “social endowed beauty,” but brain activity corresponding to representational and abstract stimuli (Lengger et al., 2007 ; Fairhall and Ishai, 2008 ; Cattaneo et al., 2014 , 2015 , 2017 ).Furthermore, Zhang et al.'s ( 2017 ) notion of a sense of beauty that responds to certain attributes is untenable given the abundant evidence showing, first, that there is no such thing as a sense of beauty and, second, that aesthetic valuation is not a response triggered by object features.A century and a half of experimental research on art and aesthetics has yielded no trace of mental or neural processes particular to aesthetic valuation (Brown et al., 2011 ; Nadal, 2013 ; Chatterjee and Vartanian, 2014 ). The evidence actually shows that aesthetic valuation relies on the very same brain circuits involved in appraising the value of biologically relevant objects depending on one's state and goals (Skov, 2010 ; Brown et al., 2011 ; Salimpoor and Zatorre, 2013 ; Vartanian and Skov, 2014 ; Pearce et al., 2016 ; Mallik et al., 2017 ). These circuits compute the value of various sorts of objects and prospects, from the most basic and tangible, like food and sex, to the most abstract, like money and art (Levy and Glimcher, 2012 ; Ruff and Fehr, 2014 ; Berridge and Kringelbach, 2015 ). The notion of an aesthetic sense, faculty, or process is merely a vestige of Eighteenth century British Enlightenment (Kivy, 2003 ). It has no empirical support.The conception of beauty as a response triggered by object features does not hold up to the evidence either. This conception is an expression of na?ve realism, the composite belief that (1) properties such as color, form, or sound are attributes of objects in the world; (2) that perceiving is a stimuli-driven transformation of sensory input into coherent percepts; and (3) that the general function of cognition is to create accurate representations of the world (Neisser, 1967 ; Varela et al., 1991 ). Despite its intuitive appeal, na?ve realism is refuted by the most basic facts of perception and cognition. First, color, form, and sound are not properties of objects, but attributes of our experience of objects. A perceived color, for instance,