We extend Mangan's account of fringe consciousness by discussing our work on processing experiences. Our research shows that variations in speed at different stages of perceptual processing can jointly contribute to subjective processing ease, supporting Mangan's notion that different mental processes condense into one subjective experience. We also discuss our studies showing that facilitation of perceptual processing leads to positive affect, supporting Mangan's suggestion that an evaluative component is built into cognitive phenomenology. Finally, we review research demonstrating that people draw (...) on processing experiences to make a variety of judgments, supporting Mangan's emphasis on the functional importance of cognitive feelings. (shrink)

Movement perception and its role in aesthetic experience have been often studied, within empirical aesthetics, in relation to the human body. No such specificity has been defined in neuroimaging studies with respect to contents lacking a human form. The aim of this work was to explore, through functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), how perceived movement is processed during the aesthetic judgment of paintings using two types of content: human subjects and scenes of nature. Participants, untutored in the arts, were shown the (...) stimuli and asked to make aesthetic judgments. Additionally, they were instructed to observe the paintings and to rate their perceived movement in separate blocks. Observation highlighted spontaneous processes associated with aesthetic experience, whereas movement judgment outlined activations specifically related to movement processing. The ratings recorded during aesthetic judgment revealed that nature scenes received higher scored than human content paintings. The imaging data showed similar activation, relative to baseline, for all stimuli in the three tasks, including activation of occipito-temporal areas, posterior parietal and premotor cortices. Contrast analyses within aesthetic judgment task showed that human content activated, relative to nature, precuneus, fusiform gyrus and posterior temporal areas, whose activation was prominent for dynamic human paintings. In contrast, nature scenes activated, relative to human stimuli, occipital and posterior parietal cortex/precuneus, involved in visuospatial exploration and pragmatic coding of movement, as well as central insula. Static nature paintings further activated, relative to dynamic nature stimuli, central and posterior insula. Besides insular activation, which was specific for aesthetic judgment, we found a large overlap in the activation pattern characterizing each stimulus dimension (content and dynamism) across observation, aesthetic judgment and movement judgment tasks. These findings support the idea that the aesthetic evaluation of artworks depicting both human subjects and nature scenes involves a motor component, and that the associated neural processes occur quite spontaneously in the viewer. Furthermore, considering the functional roles of posterior and central insula, we suggest that nature paintings may evoke aesthetic processes requiring an additional proprioceptive and sensori-motor component implemented by “motor accessibility” to the represented scenario, which is needed to judge the aesthetic value of the observed painting. (shrink)

Humans naturally perceive visual patterns in a global manner and are remarkably capable of extracting object shapes based on properties such as proximity, closure, symmetry, and good continuation. Notwithstanding the role of these properties in perceptual grouping, studies highlighted differences in disembedding performance across individuals, which are summarized by the field dependence dimension. Evidence suggests that age and educational attainment explain part of this variability, whereas the role of sex is still highly debated. Also, which stimulus features primarily influence inter-individual (...) variations in perceptual grouping has still to be fully determined. Building upon these premises, we assessed the role of age, education level, and sex on performance at the Leuven Embedded Figure Test—a proxy of disembedding abilities—in 391 cisgender individuals. We also investigated to what extent shape symmetry, closure, complexity, and continuation relate to task accuracy. Overall, target asymmetry, closure, and good continuation with the embedding context increase task difficulty. Simpler shapes are more difficult to detect than those with more lines, yet context complexity impairs the recognition of complex targets to a greater extent. Concerning demographic data, we confirm that age and educational attainment are significantly associated with disembedding abilities and reveal a perceptual advantage in males. In summary, our study further highlights the role of shape properties in disembedding performance and unveils sex differences not reported so far. (shrink)

People implicitly associate different emotions with different locations in left-right space. Which aspects of emotion do they spatialize, and why? Across many studies people spatialize emotional valence, mapping positive emotions onto their dominant side of space and negative emotions onto their non-dominant side, consistent with theories of metaphorical mental representation. Yet other results suggest a conflicting mapping of emotional intensity (a.k.a., emotional magnitude), according to which people associate more intense emotions with the right and less intense emotions with the left (...) — regardless of their valence; this pattern has been interpreted as support for a domain-general system for representing magnitudes. To resolve the apparent contradiction between these mappings, we first tested whether people implicitly map either valence or intensity onto left-right space, depending on which dimension of emotion they attend to (Experiments 1a, b). When asked to judge emotional valence, participants showed the predicted valence mapping. However, when asked to judge emotional intensity, participants showed no systematic intensity mapping. We then tested an alternative explanation of findings previously interpreted as evidence for an intensity mapping (Experiments 2a, b). These results suggest that previous findings may reflect a left-right mapping of spatial magnitude (i.e., the size of a salient feature of the stimuli) rather than emotion. People implicitly spatialize emotional valence, but, at present, there is no clear evidence for an implicit lateral mapping of emotional intensity. These findings support metaphor theory and challenge the proposal that mental magnitudes are represented by a domain-general metric that extends to the domain of emotion. (shrink)

This paper discusses the significance for the philosophy of perception and aesthetics of certain productions of the ‘offline brain’. These are experienced in hypnagogic and other trance states, and in disease- or drug-induced hallucination. They bear a similarity to other visual patterns in nature, and reappear in human artistry, especially of the craft type. The reasons behind these resonances are explored, along with the question why we are disposed to find geometrical complexity and ‘supercolouration’ beautiful. The paper concludes with a (...) plea on behalf of neuroaesthetics, but with a caution or two. (shrink)

Company–cause fit has been one of the major issues in the domain of corporate social responsibility. This study tries to expand the perspective from company–cause to company–non-profit organization (NPO) fit, and it gives implications to firms looking for long-term collaboration with an NPO. Specifically, it suggests three types of fit, i.e., familiarity, business, and activity fit and investigates the potential effects of these fits in social alliances between companies and the partnering NPOs on consumer attributions of the firms’ motives for (...) the alliances. An experiment that used scenarios revealed that consumers perceive high-fitted alliances on the dimensions of the familiarity and activity fit as being more public-serving than low-matched ones. However, the consumers’ attribution of the motive is not different between the high and low business fit. The implications of the research results are discussed from an academic and practical standpoint. (shrink)