The Developing Aesthetic Brain and Its Social Origins

Neuroaesthetics has mapped the mature brain networks underlying aesthetic experience but lacks a developmental mechanism explaining how these networks become tuned to produce culturally specific preferences. The developmental-neuroaesthetics framework developed here centers on a two-system model: biological perceptual primitives (System A) and socially gated cultural tuning (System B). Cultural aesthetics are acquired through social gating during infancy, via mechanisms analogous to language acquisition. This process leverages infant-directed pedagogical signals and shared experience to flag culturally specific stimuli for affective learning. Neuroimaging evidence demonstrates that the infant medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a specialized role in social perception from early in life, serving as the ontogenetic foundation for the adult mPFC's aesthetic-valuation system. Interbrain synchrony during adult-infant interactions may provide a candidate mechanism through which shared experiences support aesthetic-value learning. The default mode network, of which the mPFC is a core component, is itself shaped by early social interaction, linking social experience directly to the neural substrate of aesthetic valuation. This framework reconciles cultural diversity with biological universals, generating testable predictions linking early social-neural responsivity to later cultural-aesthetic conformity.