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The processing fluency theory and the impact of motivation on our subjective interpretation of beauty

How do we perceive something as being beautiful? Are there some objective aspects of beauty? These are some of the questions that philosophers have asked themselves for centuries. Today, thanks to the development of neuroscience and new modern tools we can get a better understanding as to what mechanisms are responsible for our perception of beauty as individuals. In this post, we will explore a research conducted by Dr. Grzywacz: “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder or an Objective Truth? A Neuroscientific Answer”, and a research by Dr. Gottlieb: “Motivated cognition: Neural and computational mechanisms of curiosity, attention and intrinsic motivation”

Dr. Grzywacz proposes that beauty has both objective and subjective components. According to the fluency theory, "the easier it is for a perceiver to process the properties of a stimulus, the greater its aesthetic response will be”, this would mean that beauty is both dependent on the perceiver as well as on the object itself. Moreover, objects differ in how fluent they are, meaning that some objects are more easily perceived than others. But what makes an object fluent? Some of these objective components of beauty can be proportion, balance, contrast, complexity and even symmetry for example. As we said previously, the more fluent an object is, the more we will perceive it as positive, in contrast, the less it is fluent, the more we will perceive the object as negative. Our brain has dedicated neural circuitry for fluency processing, for example fMRI studies have shown that symmetry is processed very early in our visual cortex making the processing of symmetrical stimuli faster and thus more fluent. Furthermore, evolutionary important variable which have specific brain regions dedicated to them form a major part of processing fluency. This still doesn’t tell us why fluency has a positive neuroaesthetic response in our brain, well this is because we constantly make perceptual estimations through our sensory system to take information about our environment. These estimations are then used to make decisions which could be life threatening, thus it makes sense that evolution might associate reward to these fluency features. For example, balance which is another component that is perceived fluently is critical to survival, our brain notices imbalance immediately because it “isn’t normal” and so we avoid falling off a steep hill for example. Another fluently processed feature which might be a bit confusing to understand is complexity, why would more information be more fluent? Have you ever looked at a Jackson Pollock painting and asked yourself, what is going on here? Well, complexity is in constant competition with other fluency features such as symmetry and balance. If the amount of balance and symmetry increase in an image then the amount of complexity will therefore decrease. This is all very interesting, but if objects have objectively defined characteristics for beauty then why don’t we all like the same things? Well because firstly, this would be extremely boring, secondly and more seriously this is because we as individuals give more or less importance to these fluency features. How we perceive beauty subjectively is due to our cultural background, meaning the different environments we grew-up or live in and how we interact and experience with this environment. Let us take a simple example, if you see an apple on the table, it is bright red and is in great shape, your brain will take all this sensory information and make a prediction (does it look good or bad), you will then taste it and ultimately decide if it is good or bad. Your brain will then learn this outcome and make changes to future predictions about the apple so that overtime the prediction will resemble more the actual reward or outcome. It is also said that motivation plays a key role in individual aesthetic preference, if you see the apple for example and you never tried an apple before but you just ate a big lunch so you’re not hungry, hunger would be your motivational factor in this case, thus you have no motivation because you just ate so you won’t try the apple and you won’t learn from this experience. 

Let’s see why motivation is so important in individual learning of aesthetic preferences. Dr. Gottlieb’s research is focused on answering, “What are the factors that motivate us to learn, memorize or otherwise process new information? How do these intellectual drives serve our biological needs, how do they control our actions and what are their neural substrates?” The research mostly focuses on curiosity which is defined as the intrinsic desire to learn or obtain information. Without curiosity, we would not learn any new aesthetic preferences. Curiosity is a specific example of a system of intrinsic motivation, it is “a behavior that is undertaken for no apparent reward except the behavior itself”. We define intrinsic behaviors as behaviors that are not necessary for survival but yet are highly motivated to pursue. For example, we each have our hobbies that we enjoy doing, and while doing these hobbies we might experience what we call a state of “flow” defined as “intense feelings of effortless control, concentration, enjoyment and even a contraction of the sense of time”. These actions are performed to maximize an internal goal. Curiosity drives us to learn, it also implies a strong connection between both cognitive and motivational systems, cognitive because each individual is free to experience and attempt to fulfill non-vital needs as he or she desires for no apparent reason. When curiosity arises in our cognitive processing, the brain does not simply encode and remember information, rather the brain will evaluate the degree of knowledge associated to these cognitive operations, as well as its emotional qualities and will use these estimations to generate an “interest”, this interest will ultimately decide rather or not to act, thus directly impacting learning. It is said that the mechanism that drives curiosity would be adapted to allow us to discover new and useful regularities in wide open-ended spaces which contain unlearnable tasks. We possess strategies to overcome the difficulties associated with unlearnable tasks, these include exploration of new things, surprise, uncertainty, and reward. Some strategies are more complex such as "meta-cognitive estimates of learning progress and information gain”. These mechanisms act together to take our focus away from performing over learnt and unlearnable tasks, and focus our attention toward a middle range where we can learn as well as discover new things. 

Beauty has both objective features as well as subjective features, these subjective features are governed by both motivation and social factors. More specifically, curiosity plays a critical role in learning new things such as aesthetic preferences. Objective features of beauty have an important role in survival and our brain allows us to pay closer attention to these fluency features. How much we pay attention to them defines our subjective interpretation of beauty. I hope you all enjoyed this post, see you soon for more about the brain.