Aesthetic foster our perception of every-day objects: an ERP study.

Despite the broad interest in the exploration of aesthetically-related brain areas, little is known about the temporal course of the underlying neural processes. As a matter of fact, only few studies have investigated the temporal dynamics of the aesthetic evaluation to understand which cognitive processing stages are affected by attractiveness. Previous electrophysiological studies may suggest a relationship between emotions and aesthetic but there is no systematical study on the time course of the interplay between aesthetic feelings and the single cognitive processes (Jacobsen, & Höfel, 2003; Höfel & Jacobsen, 2007; Righi, Orlando & Marzi, 2014). Righi et al. (2014) provided evidence in favor of the hypothesis that aesthetic values allow perceivers to enhance the detection of potential actions by showing that everyday objects that are perceived as more functional and attractive have a privileged neural activation. This study (Righi, Orlando & Marzi, 2014) raises a crucial issue because, if we assume that the aesthetic appreciation has a main role in modulating our interaction with the environment by guiding adaptively our behavior (Rolls, 2015; Xenakis & Arnellos, 2015), then it is conceivable that aesthetic experience implicitly exerts a controlling influence on cognitive processes such as perception, attention, decision making and response selection. Taking this into account, the present study aims to investigate the temporal course of the interaction between aesthetic experience and the cognitive processes. Specifically, we aim to further investigate whether, when and to what extent the attraction toward high attractive stimuli (as well as, the dislike toward low attractive ones) may influence cognitive processing (i.e. perception, attention, decision making and response selection). Thus, we employed Event Related Potentials (ERPs) to assess the temporal dynamics of the interaction between attractiveness and cognitive processing. In order to understand the way in which the aesthetic appraisal may modulate the cognitive functioning in the daily life, we used high attractive and low attractive everyday tools. We chose to employ a classical visual odd-ball task that is a well-known experimental design used within ERPs research to study how task-relevance of the stimuli can affect stages of information processing (Verleger, Jaskowski, & Wascher, 2005; Polich, 2010). In our active oddball task participants were required to press a button only for infrequent (target) stimuli (Go stimuli) which are task-relevant. Taking into account that participants were asked to respond to target only (Go stimuli), while refraining from responding to the standard (NoGo stimuli – non-relevant stimuli), our procedure can be considered also a Go/NoGo task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) measured in Go/NoGo tasks consistently reveal differences, which consist of a negative displacement (N200) in NoGo as compared to Go ERPs (Gajewski & Falkenstein, 2013). The N200 has been typically related to a motor inhibitory process (in Nogo) but its amplitude may be modulated also by response selection especially in conflict tasks (Bruin et al. (2001). In order to characterize the sequence of neural events, early and late ERP components were considered.