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Nadal Marcos | Fellow Visitor
2010-12-15 - 2010-12-20 | Research area: Cognition and Sociality
Evolution of Aesthetic Appreciations
Evolutionary psychology has provided a fruitful framework for the development of several hypotheses regarding the evolution of aesthetic appreciation. These accounts generally assume that aesthetic appreciation is the product of content-specific information-processing mechanisms that evolved in a certain environment to solve particular adaptive problems. In my talk, I will review results from the fields of empirical aesthetics, neuroimaging, and comparative neuroscience, and discuss their implications for approaches to the evolution of aesthetic appreciation. This review suggests that aesthetic appreciation is the result of several cognitive and affective processes associated with activity in diverse brain regions, none of which seems to play an exclusive role in the aesthetic experience. Furthermore, I will argue that aesthetic appreciation is the result of a kind of mosaic evolution. Whereas some of these underlying processes and their neural correlates must have appeared at some point in the human lineage, others seem to have been inherited from earlier primate ancestors.