The need to create art is found in every human society, manifest in many different ways across many different cultures. Is this universal need rooted in our evolutionary past? The Art Instinct reveals that it is, combining evolutionary psychology with aesthetics to shed new light on fascinating questions about the nature of art.

We propose that aesthetic pleasure is a function of the perceiver's processing dynamics: The more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response. We review variables known to influence aesthetic judgments, such as figural goodness, figure-ground contrast, stimulus repetition, symmetry, and prototypicality, and trace their effects to changes in processing fluency. Other variables that influence processing fluency, like visual or semantic priming, similarly increase judgments of aesthetic pleasure. Our proposal provides an integrative framework for the study (...) of aesthetic pleasure and sheds light on the interplay between early preferences versus cultural influences on taste, preferences for both prototypical and abstracted forms, and the relation between beauty and truth. In contrast to theories that trace aesthetic pleasure to objective stimulus features per se, we propose that beauty is grounded in the processing experiences of the perceiver, which are in part a function of stimulus properties. (shrink)

Proposes a theory of hedonic tone in disinterested states. It is hypothesized that the laws governing the amount of pleasure induced by fairly neutral stimuli are analogous to but not identical with laws governing recognition, memory, and a number of other cognitive phenomena. The amount of pleasure induced by such stimuli is held to be a hyperbolic function of the degree to which the cognitive units coding the stimulus are activated. Difficulties with competing hedonic theories, which led to formulation of (...) the present theory, are noted. A number of predictions derived from the cognitive theory, dealing with simultaneous/instantaneous, serial, or repetitive effects, are discussed. In cases in which empirical data are available, it is shown that these data conform to theoretical predictions. Several counterintuitive predictions—along with supportive data—are presented. A number of untested predictions are also presented. (shrink)