The neural mechanism of aesthetic judgments of dynamic landscapes: an fMRI study

Abstract

Most previous neuroaesthetics research has been limited to considering the aesthetic judgment of static stimuli, with few studies examining the aesthetic judgment of dynamic stimuli. The present study explored the neural mechanisms underlying aesthetic judgment of dynamic landscapes, and compared the neural mechanisms between the aesthetic judgments of dynamic landscapes and static ones. Participants were scanned while they performed aesthetic judgments on dynamic landscapes and matched static ones. The results revealed regions of occipital lobe, frontal lobe, supplementary motor area, cingulate cortex and insula were commonly activated both in the aesthetic judgments of dynamic and static landscapes. Furthermore, compared to static landscapes, stronger activations of middle temporal gyrus (MT/V5), and hippocampus were found in the aesthetic judgments of dynamic landscapes. This study provided neural evidence that visual processing related regions, emotion-related regions were more active when viewing dynamic landscapes than static ones, which also indicated that dynamic stimuli were more beautiful than static ones.