ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2024
Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Music as a scientific metaphor for mind and brain.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- Engaging with uncertainty when engagement is uncertain.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- How artists experience their own art.PloS one · 2026Article
- Embodied neuroaesthetics and the psychotherapeutic relational field.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Unveiling the relationship between aesthetic experiences and attention through a cross-experiment validation of their processing biomarkers.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Toward a neuroaesthetics of interactions: Insights from dance on the aesthetics of individual and interacting bodies.iScience · 2025Review
- The perceptual primacy of feeling: Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Preliminary validation and refinement of the psychedelic aesthetic experience questionnaire.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Fluency, prediction and motivation: how processing dynamics, expectations and epistemic goals shape aesthetic judgements.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Metaphors or mechanism? Predictive coding and a (brief) history of empirical study of the arts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Predicting instabilities: an embodied perspective on unstable experiences with art and design.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Narrative as active inference: an integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Binocularly suppressed stimuli induce brain activities related to aesthetic emotions.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Meeting the multidimensional self: fostering selfhood at the interface of Creative Arts Therapies and neuroscience.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an 'epistemic arc', consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which we cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call 'aesthetic'. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters-at the expense of affective aspects-and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)-at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.