When judging artworks' visual complexity, people don’t rely only on their visual features.
They also consider valence: negative valence increases judged complexity, while positive valence reduces it.
Information about the artworks attenuates this affective influence.

doi.org/10.1111/bjop.70037

When cherished beliefs and intuitions turn out to not be confirmed. Not a lot of difference in the impact of art seen in museums versus on a screen in the lab. Reasons to actually test intuitions. With @kohinoordarda.bsky.social and others. 🧪 #sciart www.nature.com/articles/s41...

After a lot of work, I'm overjoyed to share that our lab is complete with the last additions: Victor & Ford Transit 🎉

"Can arts-based interventions improve health? A conceptual and methodological critique" by @mnadal.bsky.social and I has been accepted for publication in Physics of Life Reviews.

The pre-proof version is online at the following URL:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Is interoceptive sensing unified across internal organs? 🫀🫁 Our high-powered psychophysical study (N=241) suggests not. Bayesian evidence indicates interoceptive processes are largely modality-specific—challenging the idea of a unitary interoceptive sense.
🔗 Read here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

For those with the luxury of time (and interest) this is a lovely 1 hour conversation I had about the evolution of neuroaesthetics and where we in my center @pcfn.bsky.social are in our thinking. www.buzzsprout.com/2282727/epis...

My conversation about beautiful conversation with Daniel Stillman just released. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/y...

In a @currentbiology.bsky.social paper earlier this year, led by @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social, we analysed Beethoven’s genome with a polygenic index related to musicality, as a way to communicate limits of genetic predictions at the individual level & the complexity of links between DNA & behaviour:

Seen through this lens, aesthetic experiences are not essentially different from other kinds of experience, disinterested, or involve a unique sort of pleasure. They are rooted in basic reward processes shared with other animals, have motivational and biological roles, and deep evolutionary origins

We abandon the assumption-burdened concept of aesthetic experience in favor of sensory valuation, reframing aesthetic experience as an outcome of domain-general processes in the reward system. These processes integrate sensory information, expectations, experience, context, and physiological states

@mskov01.bsky.social and I challenge traditional ideas about aesthetic experience—rooted in 18th-century philosophy rather than empirical evidence--that view aesthetic experience as uniquely human, disinterested, and lacking utilitarian or motivational functions. We propose a radical shift

Aesthetic experience reconsidered: The sensory valuation account of aesthetic experience. doi.org/10.1038/s441... #Neuroaesthetics #EmpiricalAesthetics #AestheticExperience @natrevpsych.bsky.social