Aesthetic shapes our perception of every-day objects: An ERP study

Several theories hypothesize a main role of aesthetic in driving our adaptive interaction with the environment. In light of this, our main goal was investigate the temporal course of the interaction between the aesthetic experience and the emotional and cognitive processes. For this aim we employed Event Related Potentials (ERPs) during an odd-ball task in which participants were presented with high and low attractive everyday tools. Cognitive and affective effects were observed on ERP components (P100, P250, P200, N200, P300 and LPP) suggesting that aesthetically pleasant and unpleasant tools may elicit distinct pattern of neural activity. Positive aesthetic feelings may prompt cognitive information processes from early visual feature extraction/ integration, motor response selection to categorization and decisional processes. Differently, negative aesthetic feelings would not influence cognitive processing but could activate a negative emotional bias toward task-relevant stimuli.