The contour of an object is a salient feature that defines its identity. Also discussed are implications for therapy and education.ĭrawing is a way to represent common-use objects. All of these reinforcer categories have biological utilities that account for the selection, throughout evolution, of individuals who were susceptible to those reinforcers’ effects. The domain of aesthetic reinforcers extends beyond the arts to the quality of artifacts like tools, implements, or vehicles, certain types of interpersonal activity, and displays of competency. The reinforcing properties of aesthetic reactions are key to the maintenance of such cognitive competencies as language and the manipulation of concepts, learning and inquiry skills, mentalization skills like visualizing and other types of thinking, various social skills, and cultural cohesion. Such an analysis suggests that the development of aesthetic sensibility is an important milestone in human evolution.
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The commentaries support my contention that a full understanding of the behavioral and biological aspects of aesthetic reactions requires a phylogenetic analysis of their evolutionary origins. An important mechanism by which originally neutral stimuli acquire the power to elicit aesthetic reactions is Pavlovian pairing, often early in life, with stimuli that already possessed eliciting functions. Aesthetic reactions can never be predicted or explained based on stimulus properties only. They also increased my confidence in the generality of my conclusion, based in part on my analysis of hundreds of instances, that aesthetic reactions (as well as many other types of affective reactions) are elicited by the conjunction of (a) synergetic (unusual and transformative) interactions among stimuli, (b) the behavioral history and current state of the reacting individual, and (c) circumstantial features of the prevailing situation, including social and cultural factors. The commentaries prompted my realization that it is more useful to view the core of the aesthetic reaction as composed of a set of Pavlovian respondents than as a quasi-emotional reaction. Finally, there is evidence that different aspects of musical events lead to different responses, illustrating that the aesthetic brew is a complicated mix. Surprise/complexity/originality/expectation violations play a role too, but their influence needs to be carefully Goldilocked: There is an inverse-J-shaped relationship between originality and liking, and, within music, liking is associated with proximity to pink noise. In addition, I refer to the value of incremental work in creators, and the influence of prototypicality and self-relevance for the aesthetic response. Most of the examples are drawn from the psychology of music, pointing at people’s preferences for music from their youth, strong correlations between familiarity and liking of musical excerpts, the Caillebotte effect in preferences for paintings, and neuroimaging work on the role of anticipation in the experience of musical chills. This article argues that familiarity is an important ingredient of the aesthetic brew, potentially more important than the tinge of surprise.