Aesthetics, Affect, and Cognition: Environmental Preference from an Evolutionary Perspective

October 29, 2025

Beauty in Architecture: Not a Luxury – Only a Necessity

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By Chatterjee, A., & Vartanian, O.

Full Citation

Chatterjee, A., & Vartanian, O. (2016). Neuroscience of aesthetics. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1369(1), 172-194.

Key Findings

The nascent field of neuroaesthetics is advancing our understanding of the role of aesthetic evaluations by examining their biological bases. Here, we conduct a selective review of the literature on neuroaesthetics to demonstrate that aesthetic experiences likely emerge from the interaction between emotion–valuation, sensory–motor, and meaning–knowledge neural systems. This tripartite model can in turn be evoked to explain phenomena central to aesthetics, such as context effects on preferences.

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