ArticlePNAS nexus2025
Less is more: Aesthetic liking is inversely related to metabolic expense by the visual system.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visual features explain dynamic aesthetic experiences across distinct movie content.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Tracing aesthetic experience from perception and conception to appraisal using deep convolutional neural networks.iScience · 2026Article
- The temporal and spatial properties of memorability reveal insights into the art creation process.Cognition · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Energy efficiency is a major driving force in the evolution of organisms, and previous research implies that humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to guide optimal actions. But could this energy-saving heuristic also apply to aesthetic pleasure? We test this hypothesis using both an in silico model of the visual system (VGG19) and human observers, finding strong evidence in both. First, we measure the proxy for metabolic cost incurred by VGG19-either pretrained for object and scene categorization or randomly initialized-as it processes 4,914 images of objects and scenes, revealing an inverse relationship between aesthetic preferences and metabolic cost, and only in the pretrained model. Next, we compare aesthetic ratings of visual stimuli to metabolic activity in the human visual system, measured via the blood oxygen level-dependent signal during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We observe the same inverse relationship between blood oxygen level dependent signals and aesthetic preferences in both early visual regions (V1, V2, and V4) and higher-level regions (fusiform face area, occipital place area, and parahippocampal place area). These findings suggest that aesthetic preferences may at least partially arise from an affective heuristic favoring low-energy states, and they offer a unified framework linking empirical evidence on visual discomfort with theories of processing fluency, image complexity, and prototypicality, providing a straightforward model for understanding aesthetic judgments.
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Registered trials
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