Martin Skov

Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre · Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance

There is substantial evidence to suggest that preference for visual curvature is a reliable phenomenon. Yet, little is known about the ways in which the encoding of curvature in the brain contributes to hedonic evaluation while participants are actively engaged in making choices about objects varying in curvature. To address this question, we reana...

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...

Some studies have found strong correlations between liking and beauty ratings, suggesting that liking and beauty are merely two manifestations of the same underlying hedonic factor (Berlyne, 1974b). The results of other studies suggest that liking and beauty judgments differ in how they engage perceptual and cognitive processes associated with valu...

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 contribut...

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 th...

The Routledge International Handbook of Neuroaesthetics is an authoritative reference work that provides the reader with a wide-ranging introduction to this exciting new scientific discipline. The book brings together leading international academics to offer a well-balanced overview of this burgeoning field while addressing two questions central to...

Evidence dating back a century shows that humans are sensitive to and exhibit a preference for visual curvature. This effect has been observed in different age groups, human cultures, and primate species, suggesting that a preference for curvature could be universal. At the same time, several studies have found that preference for curvature is modu...

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements t...

Evidence dating back a century suggests that humans are sensitive to and exhibit a preference for visual curvature. Recently, this effect has been observed in different age groups, human cultures, and primate species, suggesting that a preference for curvature might be universal. At the same time, several studies have found preference for curvature...

Sensory liking is a biological process by which biological organisms compute how liked or disliked a sensory stimulus is. The purpose of this process is to tag the sensory objects an organism encounter in its physical environment as either conducive or threatening to survival. Objects that are deemed likeable elicit appetitive behaviour whereas obj...

Neuroaesthetics is new scientific discipline. Bibliometric data show that publications indexed as neuroasthetics only started to appear in the 2000s. There was, however, a history of work trying to furnish aesthetics with a neuroscientific basis that preceded the emergence of neuroaesthetics by 200 years. This chapter tries to explain what motivate...

Aesthetic liking has traditionally been thought to be caused by specific object properties: symmetry, curvature, etc. One of the great insights of neuroaesthetics is the realization that expectations play almost as great a role in shaping liking responses. For example, by prefacing exposure to an artwork with information about its provenance it is...

The concept of aesthetic appreciation is a historical construction with a history that traces back to the beginning of the 18th century. It proposes the idea that humans can experience a specific kind of nonutilitarian pleasure when exposed to a distinct set of aesthetic qualities. This chapter surveys findings from recent neuroimaging studies that...

It has long been observed that experience influences aesthetic evaluations. Psychological research has found multiple examples of experts and nonexperts forming different liking responses to similar stimuli. It remains unclear, though, precisely why experts evaluate objects they are experts on differently from people who are not experts. In the art...

Neuroscience joins the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. In this volume, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume will inform and stimulate...

Hedonic evaluation of sensory objects varies from person to person. While this variability has been linked to differences in experience, little is known about why stimuli lead to different evaluations in different people. We used linear mixed‐effects models to determine the extent to which the openness, contour, and ceiling height of interior space...

Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesized that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art fo...

Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesized that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art fo...

Evaluative judgment - i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked - is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuro-imaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To i...

Evaluative judgment—i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked—is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To invest...

Evaluative judgment—i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked—is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To invest...

Hedonic evaluation of sensory objects varies from person to person. While this variability has been linked to differences in experience and personality traits, little is known about why stimuli lead to different evaluations in different people. We used linear mixed effect models to determine the extent to which the openness, contour, and ceiling he...

Beauty is commonly used to refer to positive evaluative appraisals that are uniquely human. Little is known, however, about what distinguishes beauty in terms of psychological function or neurobiological mechanisms. Our review describes recent empirical studies and synthesizes what behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific experiments have reveale...

This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in A. Chatterjee & E. Cardillo (eds.), Brain Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite this version.

This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in A. Chatterjee & E. Cardillo (eds.), Brain Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite this version.

This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in A. Chatterjee & E. Cardillo (eds.), Brain Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus. Oxford University Press. Please do not cite this version.

Beauty is commonly used to refer to positive evaluative appraisals that are uniquely human. Little is known, however, about what distinguishes beauty in terms of psychological function or neurobiological mechanisms. This review describes recent empirical studies, and synthesizes what behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific experiments have revea...

Many scientific disciplines give rise to research published under the moniker of aesthetics. For instance, both psychology and neuroscience have highly active subfields focused on aesthetics research, known as empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. However, it remains unclear what aesthetics is about, and, consequently, if aesthetics research pu...

Nodes, 11-12, pp. 8-15 (2020). http://nodesjournal.com/en/ Italian translation of "Art Is Not Special"

The theory of sexual selection posits that sexual species make use of sensory preferences for physical traits and behavior displayed by potential sexual partners to inform mate choices. This suggests that the ability to compute hedonic liking for perceptual stimuli is widespread across biological taxa, have a long evolutionary history, and that the...

Menninghaus and colleagues (2019) have recently argued that aesthetic emotions constitute a distinct class of emotions. They claim that aesthetic emotions are distinct because they involve an aesthetic evaluation, they are tuned to specific aesthetic virtues, they involve subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure, and predict liking or disliking. H...

Empirical aesthetics is associated with two research questions: How the mind generally assigns value to sensory stimuli and how it responds specifically to art objects. Researchers have debated whether these phenomena share enough to warrant being collapsed into a single field. To ask how these particular questions came to be associated with aesthe...

Empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics study two main issues: the valuation of sensory objects and art experience. These two issues are often treated as if they were intrinsically interrelated: Research on art experience focuses on how art elicits aesthetic pleasure, and research on valuation focuses on special categories of objects or emotional...

Review of M. Harrison (Ed.), Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychology (Thames & Hudson, 2019).

Translated version of "What have we learned since Neuroaesthetics?"

Many scientific disciplines give rise to research published under the moniker of aesthetics. For instance, both psychology and neuroscience have highly active subfields focused on aesthetics research, known as empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. However, it remains unclear what aesthetics is about, and, consequently, if aesthetics research pu...

Many scientific disciplines give rise to research published under the moniker of aesthetics. For instance, both psychology and neuroscience have highly active subfields focused on aesthetics research, known as empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. However, it remains unclear what aesthetics is about, and, consequently, if aesthetics research pu...

Preface written for the second edition of the Korean translation of Neuroaesthetics.

Alexis Makin argued in a recent paper that Empirical Aesthetics is unable to properly advance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in aesthetic experience. The reason for this predicament, he claims, is an inability of current research methods to capture the psychological properties that truly characterize aesthetic experience, especially t...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This chapter introduces the reader to the basic features of the neurobiological system involved in forming a hedonic liking response for sensory objects. In this way it aims to provide nonneuroscientists working in empirical aesthetics with a first primer on the neurobiological mechanisms and computational principles that underlie aesthetic appreci...

Alexis Makin argued in a recent paper that Empirical Aesthetics is unable to properly advance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in aesthetic experience. The reason for this predicament, he claims, is an inability of current research methods to capture the psychological properties that truly characterize aesthetic experience, especially t...

This chapter introduces the reader to the basic features of the neurobiological processes involved in forming a hedonic liking response for sensory objects. In this way it aims to provide non-neuroscientists working in empirical aesthetics with a first primer on the neurobiological mechanisms and computational principles that underlie aesthetic app...

Our understanding of aesthetic appreciation has undergone a profound change during the past 20 years, as a result of the ability to study the human brain through neuroimaging. A number of findings cast into doubt important tenets of previous theories and models. Specifically, neuroscientific evidence suggests that aesthetic appreciation is not a di...

Consumers frequently make decisions about how much they are willing to pay (WTP) for specific products and services, but little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying such calculations. In this study, we were interested in testing whether specific brain activation—the asymmetry in engagement of the prefrontal cortex—would be related to con...

Much evidence suggests that preference for curvilinear visual contour is robust. We collected data from experts (i.e., self-identified architects and designers) and nonexperts to test the hypothesis that expertise moderates one’s sensitivity to curvilinear contour within architectural spaces. When assessing beauty, experts found rectilinear spaces...

The assumption that human cognition requires exceptional explanations holds strong in some domains of behavioral and brain sciences. Scientific aesthetics in general, and neuroaesthetics in particular, abound with claims for art-specific cognitive or neural processes. This assumption fosters a conceptual structure disconnected from other fields and...

We commend Menninghaus et al. for tackling the role of negative emotions in art reception. However, their model suffers from shortcomings that reduce its applicability to empirical studies of the arts: poor use of evidence, lack of integration with other models, and limited derivation of testable hypotheses. We argue that theories about art experie...

In everyday listening, we can selectively attend to different kinds of object information in the same acoustic input. Previous studies on speech categories suggest that top-down task demands may enhance cortical encoding of behaviorally relevant sounds in speech-specific auditory regions. However, much less is known about the cortical processing in...

What does it take to have a creative mind? Theories of creative cognition assert that the quantity of automatic associations places fundamental constraints on the probability of reaching creative solutions. Due to the difficulties inherent in isolating automated associative responses from cognitive control, the neural basis underlying this faculty...

In everyday sound environments, we recognize sound sources and events by attending to relevant aspects of an acoustic input. Evidence about the cortical mechanisms involved in extracting relevant category information from natural sounds is, however, limited to speech. Here, we used functional MRI to measure cortical response patterns while human li...

In neuroeconomics and neuromarketing, the assessment of arousal has become one of the key measures in our effort to understand the basic mechanisms of value-based choice. While neurophysiological responses such as pupil dilation and galvanic skin response (GSR) have provided a significant explanatory value in the mechanisms of decision-making, othe...

The field of neuroaesthetics has gained in popularity in recent years but also attracted criticism from the perspectives both of the humanities and the sciences. In an effort to consolidate research in the field, we characterize neuroaesthetics as the cognitive neuroscience of aesthetic experience, drawing on long traditions of research in empirica...

Human behavior in social dilemmas is strongly framed by the social context, but the mechanisms underlying this framing effect remains poorly understood. To identify the behavioral and neural responses mediating framing of social interactions, subjects underwent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging while playing a Prisoners Dilemma game. In separat...

Human behavior in social dilemmas is strongly framed by the social context, but the mechanisms underlying this framing effect remain poorly understood. To identify the behavioral and neural responses mediating framing of social interactions, participants underwent functional MRI while playing a prisoner’s dilemma game. In separate neuroimaging sess...

Neuroesthetics is a subfield of cognitive neuroscience that studies the biological mechanisms and psychological processes evoked in the creator or the spectator when adopting an esthetic orientation toward an artistic or nonartistic object in the course of interacting with it. These psychological processes are related to perception, cognition, emot...

Intelligent action entails exploiting predictions about associations between elements of ones environment. The hippocampus and mediotemporal cortex are endowed with the network topology, physiology, and neurochem-istry to automatically and sparsely code sensori-cognitive associations that can be reconstructed from single or partial inputs. Whilst a...

Decision-making in social dilemmas is suggested to rely on three factors: the valuation of a choice option, the relative judgment of two or more choice alternatives, and individual factors affecting the ease at which judgments and decisions are made. Here, we test whether empathy—an individual’s relative ability to understand others’ thoughts, emot...

Despite decades of scientific scrutiny, much is still unknown about the effects that brands have on perception. Brands are known to lead to changes in attention and mnemonic processing and by altering emotional preferences they imbue products with value. Less, however, is known about the exact mechanism through which this occurs. Here, a novel and...

Extant research in political science has demonstrated that citizens’ opinions on policies are influenced by their attachment to the party sponsoring them. At the same time, little evidence exists illuminating the psychological processes through which such party cues are filtered. From the psychological literature on source cues, we derive two possi...

On average, we urban dwellers spend about 90% of our time indoors, and share the intuition that the physical features of the places we live and work in influence how we feel and act. However, there is surprisingly little research on how architecture impacts behavior, much less on how it influences brain function. To begin closing this gap, we condu...

Compulsive buying disorder (CBD) is noted by an obsession with shopping and a chronic, repetitive purchasing behavior with adverse consequences for the sufferer and their social surroundings. While CBD is often classified as an impulse control disorder (ICD), little is still known about the actual psychological and physiological mechanisms underlyi...

The contents of this special issue represent four main approaches to the biological underpinnings of art and aesthetics: psychology, neuroimaging, neurology, and evolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

Abstract Extant research in political science has demonstrated that citizens' opinions on policies are influenced by their attachment to the party sponsoring them. At the same time, little evidence exists illuminating the psychological processes through which such party cues are filtered. From the psychological literature on source cues, we derive...

To what extent can simple contextual events affect preference? In this study, three tests were applied to assert whether contextual unpredictability has a negative effect on preference for novel visual items. By asking subjects to rate their first impressions of novel brand logos while playing simple sounds, Study 1 shows that brand logos coupled t...

Pleasure is fundamental to well-being and the quality of life, but until recently, was barely explored by science. Current research on pleasure has brought about ground-breaking developments on several fronts, and new data on pleasure and the brain have begun to converge from many disparate fields. The time is ripe to present these important findin...

A theoretical account of the topics neuroaesthetics can be seen as to cover.

The beginning of psychological aesthetics is normally traced back to the publication of Gustav Theodor Fechner's seminal book Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876. Following in the footsteps of this rich tradition, editors Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian view neuroaesthetics-the emerging field of inquiry concerned with uncovering the ways in which aesth...

Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is seen in daily life or in an art gallery can significantly modulate the aesthetic value humans attach to it. We investigated the neural system supporting this modulation by presenting human subjects with artworks under different contexts whilst acquiring fMRI...

Several studies have demonstrated that acquired expertise influences aesthetic judgments. In this paradigm we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study aesthetic judgments of visually presented architectural stimuli and control-stimuli (faces) for a group of architects and a group of non-architects. This design allowed us to test w...