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Published July 2014 | public
Journal Article

Pre-Existing Brain States Predict Aesthetic Judgments

Abstract

Intuition and an assumption of basic rationality would suggest that people evaluate a stimulus on the basis of its properties and their underlying utility. However, various findings suggest that evaluations often depend not only on what is being evaluated, but also on contextual factors. Here we demonstrate a further departure from normative decision making: Aesthetic evaluations of abstract fractal art by human subjects were predicted from pre-stimulus patterns of BOLD fMRI signals across a distributed network of frontal regions before the stimuli were presented. This predictive power was dissociated from motor biases in favor of pressing a particular button to indicate one's choice. Our findings suggest that endogenous neural signals present before stimulation can bias decisions at multiple levels of representation when evaluating stimuli.

Additional Information

© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article first published online: 13 Sep 2013. Manuscript Accepted: 10 Jul 2013. Manuscript Revised: 9 Jun 2013. Manuscript Received: 27 Jan 2013. We thank Nancy Kanwisher for helpful discussions and comments. We also acknowledge the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT. This research was supported by Duke-NUS, the Kanwisher lab at MIT, and National Medical Research Council Cooperative Basic Research Grant (New Investigators Grant) BNIG11nov021 to Po-Jang Hsieh.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023