The default-mode network represents aesthetic appeal that generalizes across visual domains.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Psychology

Background:

• Visual aesthetic evaluations influence decisions and well-being.
• These evaluations involve the ventral visual pathway, reward circuitry, and medial prefrontal cortex, including the default-mode network (DMN).
• It remains unclear if aesthetic appeal is represented in a domain-general manner across different visual stimuli.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the DMN or ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) holds a domain-general representation of aesthetic appeal.
• To differentiate between domain-specific and domain-general coding of aesthetic value in visual brain networks.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to collect brain activity patterns while participants judged the aesthetic appeal of artworks, architecture, and natural landscapes.
• Multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) with machine learning classifiers was employed to decode aesthetic appeal.
• Classifiers trained on one domain were tested on another to assess domain-general coding.

Main Results:

• Ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) activity patterns contained domain-specific, but not domain-general, information about aesthetic appeal.
• Default-mode network (DMN) activity patterns predicted aesthetic appeal across different visual domains (art, architecture, landscapes).
• Predictive accuracy for aesthetic appeal in the DMN correlated with the extremity of observer ratings.

Conclusions:

• The DMN appears to host a core, domain-general representation of visual aesthetic appeal.
• Domain-specific visual content representations in VOT feed into this general aesthetic network in the DMN.
• Additional prefrontal regions are involved in appreciating cultural artifacts but not natural landscapes.