ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2004
Activation of the prefrontal cortex in the human visual aesthetic perception.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2004. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers.
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89 citing papers in PubMed.
- Kisspeptin enhances brain responses to olfactory and visual cues of attraction in men.JCI insight · 2020Trial
- Dynamics of brain networks in the aesthetic appreciation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Trial
- Trial
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- Dynamic neural representations of scene beauty are relatively unaffected by stimulus timing and task.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Semantic cues modulate brain activity in different Dunhuang narrative murals appreciation: an fNIRS study.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Contextual and cultural influences on preschoolers' aesthetic experience: evidence from a situational teaching intervention in China.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Neuroendocrine Regulation of Reproductive Behavior and Emotional Control by Kisspeptin.The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism · 2025Review
- Toward a neuroaesthetics of interactions: Insights from dance on the aesthetics of individual and interacting bodies.iScience · 2025Review
- Natural color composition induces oddball P3 asymmetry associated with processing fluency.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Aesthetics, illusion of success and age interactions: disentangling effects in the closed-loop design with sham neurofeedback training.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Art-induced psychological well-being: Individual traits shape the beneficial effects of aesthetic experiences.PloS one · 2025Article
- Brain's geometries for movements and beauty judgments. A contribution of topos geometries.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The Emerging Therapeutic Potential of Kisspeptin and Neurokinin B.Endocrine reviews · 2024Review
- Neural processing of prototypicality and simplicity of product design in forming design preferences.PloS one · 2024Article
- Binocularly suppressed stimuli induce brain activities related to aesthetic emotions.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- An efficiently working brain characterizes higher mental flow that elicits pleasure in Chinese calligraphic handwriting.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Neural mechanisms underlying the hierarchical construction of perceived aesthetic value.Nature communications · 2023Article
- An "Instantaneous" Response of a Human Visual System to Hue: An EEG-Based Study.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Do we enjoy what we sense and perceive? A dissociation between aesthetic appreciation and basic perception of environmental objects or events.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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9 authors.
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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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