其他摘要 | Visual aesthetics has long been an important topic of discussion in philosophy, literature, and art, and has garnered the attention of scholars in psychology in recent years. To better understanding the essence of visual aesthetics, researchers have gradually shifted from exploring the aesthetics-related potential factors to its characteristics and mechanisms. However, the lack of systematicity has been a weakness in the relevant research on visual aesthetic characteristics. Regarding mechanisms, two crucial questions still remain: firstly, whether the experience of beauty can be distinguished from the experience of pleasure, and secondly, which are the main brain regions implicated in processing visual aesthetics? Overall, the diversity of experimental purposes, materials, and methods in many studies have limited comparisons between different studies and the interpretation of research results, leaving the "mysterious veil" of visual aesthetics yet to be fully unveiled. On the one hand, our study aimed to systematically explore two important characteristics of visual aesthetics: stability and variability. On the other hand, we also tried to clarify the association between the feelings of beauty and pleasure from macroscopic perspective and the neural mechanisms underlying visual aesthetics from mesoscopic perspective. Moreover, we have overcome the limitations of previous studies that were caused by a small range of beauty degrees in experimental materials through comprehensive collection, evaluation, and selection of image stimuli.
Our research is divided into two parts. In study 1,we systematically investigated the two mentioned characteristics of visual aesthetics. Image libraries were established through pilot study before conducting formal experiments for the purpose of the requirement. In Experiment 1,we recruited 43 subjects to evaluate all images twice over two consecutive days, with an interval of 24 hours, to explore visual aesthetic stability. We considered various features, including low-level properties (brightness, saturation, etc.), high-level properties (content, representational degree), and personal traits (personality, intelligence, etc.) that could impact visual aesthetic stability. In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, we recruited 50 and 58 subjects, respectively, to explore the time course and breakthrough suppression time of visual aesthetic variability by examining beauty evaluations under multiple presentation time conditions and the Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) paradigm. The results showed that: 1) high-level properties have a greater impact on the two kinds of stability than low-level properties. Additionally, compared with personality, the stability of visual aesthetics may have a greater relationship with the individual's knowledge experience and nonverbal intelligence. 2) people can form a relatively stable aesthetic evaluation within an average of 50ms. However, the time course of visual aesthetics is affected by the beauty degree of the image, while no low-level 3) breakthrough suppression time was found to be affected by the beauty degree of images, and certain low-level properties of the stimulus and personal traits had a predictive effect on breakthrough suppression time.
Study 2 comprised seven experiments aimed at exploring mechanisms of visual aesthetics from both macroscopic and mesoscopic perspectives. The first four experiments examined the relationship between beauty and pleasure from a macroscopic perspective: Experiment 4a, 4b and 4c investigated the separation of beauty and pleasure in stability, time course and breakthrough suppression time, respectively, on the basis of the exploration of the characteristics in Study 1. Experiment 4d then investigated the priming effect of emotion on beauty and pleasure evaluation. The results indicated that: 1) there was no obvious dissociation between beauty and pleasure from the aspect of stability. 2) The beauty degree of an image primarily determined the parameters of the time course pattern of feelings, rather than the pleasure degree. 3) Inconsistent effects were observed between the beauty degree and pleasure degree of images on breakthrough suppression time. 4) If the target stimulus was pleasant, compared with the pleasant (positive) priming feeling, the unpleasant (negative) priming feeling significantly reduced the pleasure evaluation for the target stimulus, but beauty evaluation remained unaffected. For the experiments of neural mechanism, experiment Sa firstly analyzed the activation differences between beauty and ugliness, and experiment Sb further analyzed the performance of beauty and pleasure feelings in neural activity; Experiment 6 then explored whether beautiful feeling have shared brain regions. The results showed that: 1) Unbeautiful images activated the cingulate, insula, and supplementary motor area more than beautiful images; but beautiful images had no significant activation compared with unbeautiful images. 2) Regarding the relationship between beauty and pleasure in neural activity, the whole brain activation of beauty and pleasure appeared opposite polarity effects, while the main brain regions encoding beauty and pleasure are partly shared and partly independent. This suggests that the brain processing of beauty and pleasure may have common parts, but also their own specificities. 3) Finally, for the shared brain area of beautiful feeling, no single or multiple main brain regions were discovered, and different activation patterns were displayed in different image categories. Therefore, beauty may not be a single function, but rather a distributed representation that integrates multiple functions, including sensation, perception, memory, and decision-making. That's why its characteristics associated with many factors, like stimulus properties, beauty degree and pleasure degree of images, and even personal traits.
Our research systematically explores the characteristics of visual aesthetics from multiple dimensions, and finds outs some regularities and distinctions, which will help us to better understand visual aesthetics. From the perspective of mechanism, our examination of the relationship between beauty and pleasure uncovered a polarity inconsistency between these two feelings in aesthetic experience. This finding challenges the previous viewpoint that strong positive correlation exists between the intensity of beauty and pleasure, as emphasized in earlier studies (Brielmann&Pelli, 2017, 2019a, 2019b). Furthermore, we explored the relationship of beauty and pleasure in the visual aesthetic process from various characteristics and neural mechanisms, highlighting that while beauty and pleasure exhibit more consistency in macroscopic characteristics, they are more inconsistent in microscopic features, particularly timing-related characteristics and neural activities. The results of the neural mechanism also suggest that the representation of visual aesthetics might be distributed. This discovery has revealed new aspects to explore the essence of aesthetics. Our method for separating beauty and pleasure from image stimuli provides valuable insights for future aesthetic studies. Additionally, our study identifies regular patterns of characteristics and mechanisms of visual aesthetics that could guide the application of visual art in different scenarios. |
修改评论