Aesthetic experiences across visual perception and mental imagery: Behaviorally indistinguishable, neurally distinct

Studies suggest that vivid mental imagery can blur the boundaries between reality and imagination in simple detection tasks by eliciting similar neural patterns. The question arises as to whether aesthetic experiences can similarly emerge through imagery or whether these complex experiences necessitate direct input into the sensory system. Alternating between visually perceiving and reimagining encountered stimuli, 34 participants rated faces and artworks across aesthetic dimensions. While slightly less potent, imagery is equally sufficient in evoking aesthetic experiences, and for highly vivid imaginations, evoked experiences even become behaviorally indistinguishable across conditions. Yet, representational similarity analysis reveals distinct neural patterns across conditions as the brain mainly encodes stimulus modality, even in areas canonically associated with aesthetic processing. Thus, although evoked experiences might be behaviorally identical across modalities during highly vivid trials, neural patterns differ substantially due to differences in modality, as evoked experiences are only marginally encoded.