How can aesthetic pleasure be shaped by so many visual attributes: prototypicality, fluency, complexity, symmetry, and self-relevance? I argue that aesthetic pleasure emerges from a balance between categorization-based rewards and metabolic costs of neural activity. doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

What makes an artwork beautiful, and can your brain's response decode such hidden dimensions of aesthetic appeal? We built a framework to find out 🎨 🧠 @natcomms.nature.com @cognizelab.bsky.social First author: @neocosmliang.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroaesthetics #DefaultMode

🚨 Very happy to share our *Neuron* paper: Rethinking neuroaesthetics authors.elsevier.com/a/1miuj3BtfH... With @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social & Johan Wagemans, we argue that neuroaesthetics should move beyond a focus on beauty alone and embrace the multidimensional nature of aesthetic experience.

New preprint! Why do people disagree about what looks beautiful, even when viewing the same stimulus? We show that shared aesthetic experience is linked to shared gaze during naturalistic viewing: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/4

📢 Workshop announcement. We are super excited to announce the workshop Perceptual Inferences, from philosophy to neuroscience, organized by Alexander Schütz and Daniel Kaiser. 📍 Rauischholzhausen Castle, near Marburg, Germany 🗓️ June 8 to 10, 2026. 1/4

📣 New Paper Alert! My PhD student Hannah Ovadia and I wrote a concise update on “The Role of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in Aesthetic Appeal” to synthesize evidence, highlight issues, and most importantly, consider theoretical alternatives. Free access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lz-h8MqMi...

Welcome to the IAEA Aesthetics Conference 2026 in Jena! We are delighted to announce that the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA) will hold its next international conference in Jena, Germany, from 5th to 8th May. Discover more at iaea-jena2026.org (link in bio)

I finally have some new work to share - some thoughts on how we perceive style with a sprinkle of aesthetics, Fechner, and most importantly: labradors 🐕 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How do we see style?

In a recent series of experiments, Boger and Firestone ask: How do we perceive style?’. Their findings suggest that style perception relies on basic p…

sciencedirect.com

Looking forward to #VSAC2025 ! I’ll present my poster on how eye movements relate to aesthetic preferences in Poster Session 1.

Hi Bluesky! 🦋 We are the Aesthetics and Learning Lab (ALL). ALLab is based in the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) in Tübingen. Its aim is to empirically investigate how and what can be learned from aesthetic experiences ✨ Stay tuned, for now... That's ALL folks!

Why use our new library of 300+ art images for your experiment? 🌍 Intentionally inclusive of non-Western art 😀😵‍💫😢 Normed for 11 emotional states each 📊 Interactive data viz for stimulus selection Got questions? Let us know! doi.org/10.1037/aca0...

Kaiser Lab goes #Exzellenz! The excellence cluster „The Adaptive Mind“ got funding for the next 7 years! Proud to be part of this awesome team and looking forward to all the exciting research to come. 🎆✨🥂

Hi, Bluesky! 👋 We're Creativity Research Journal (CRJ), here to highlight some of the great scientific work being done in the field of creativity research. We're the official journal of @tsfnc.bsky.social. Check out some of our latest articles here! www.tandfonline.com/journals/hcr...

Creativity Research Journal

Publishes research on various approaches to the study of creativity, including behavioral, clinical, educational, genetic, psychoanalytic, social and more.

tandfonline.com

JOB ALERT! 2-year post-doc available here in Vienna at the ARTIS Lab as part of a @fwf-at.bsky.social funded project on emotion communication through artistic drawing in autistic and non-autistic adults. Find out more here: www.artislab.org/projects/asd...

We are recruiting postdocs! Want to grow your own social networks to study creativity, cultural evolution & decision-making? We are hiring a funded postdoc at Cornell in collaboration with UC Davis, CUNY, & Princeton. Apply here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/28959

Nori Jacoby@norijacoby.bsky.social · last yr.

We are recruiting two postdoctoral scholars for a research project in human collective intelligence and creativity at UC Davis and Cornell. Joint project with @enfascination.com, @norijacoby.bsky.social, @oferon.bsky.social & Dalton Conley. Please forward this thread to relevant people. 1/n

I was interviewed as part of this article on Neuroaesthetics. Also featuring @anjanchatterjee.bsky.social www.theoverview.art/neuroaesthet...

Neuroaesthetics: Unlocking How Art Can Make Us Smarter, Happier, and Healthier

Neuroaesthetics, an emerging field of research, studies how the arts can enhance our health and wellbeing.

theoverview.art

We are excited to host you this year at the Museum Reinhard Ernst! The museum exclusively features abstract art and will stay open late on the 22nd for #VSAC2025 attendees to marvel at their extensive collection. Link: www.museum-re.de/en/

Now out in @royalsocietypublishing.org Proceedings B! Check out Gongting Wang's EEG work on individual differences in scene perception: Scenes that are more typical for individual observers are represented in an enhanced yet more idiosyncratic way. Link: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Enhanced and idiosyncratic neural representations of personally typical scenes | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Previous research shows that the typicality of visual scenes (i.e. if they are good examples of a category) determines how easily they can be perceived and represented in the brain. However, the uniqu...

royalsocietypublishing.org

While we sadly had to say goodbye to Eva in the EVAlabs, two new people will have the chance to say hello to her at her new lab in Tübingen @iwmtue.bsky.social www.iwm-tuebingen.de/www/en/karri...

Happy to share our paper on the #AestheticsToolbox around the #QIP-Machine has been published #OpenAccsess in Behavior Research Methods! It can can be used to easily and transparently compute a wide range of quantitative image properties for digital images 📸 📄 link.springer.com/article/10.3...

VSAC 2025 is honoured to welcome our keynote speakers! One of them will be Aaron Hertzmann. @aaronhertzmann.bsky.social Find more information on 2025.vsac.eu #VSAC2025 #Conference #VisualScienceofArt VISUAL SCIENCE OF ARI Keynote

Job alert! We are now looking for a PhD student starting Sept 2025, for a project on visual relations between people and objects, using behavior, EEG, fMRI, and ANNs. The project involves a collaboration with brilliant @ljubapi.bsky.social. You can find the official advertisement below.👇

We discussed the possible roles of aesthetic pleasure in evolution a bit at the journal club this week, and this makes for a good follow-up read:

Dirk Bernhardt-Walther@dirkbwalther.bsky.social · 2y ago

Energy efficiency drives evolution, and humans may have evolved pleasure-based signals to optimize actions. Does this extend to aesthetic pleasure? Yes! We find strong evidence in silico and human observers! osf.io/preprints/ps... With Yikai Tang and Wil Cunningham. @uoftpsychology.bsky.social

A starter pack for empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics researchers. go.bsky.app/HKuJYiw #empiricalaesthetics #neuroaesthetics

In recognition of Segio Della Sall's innovative use of artwork for the journal Cortex, I wrote this piece about using imagery to enhance curiosity about neuroscience papers. authors.elsevier.com/a/1kSNC2VHYC...

Now out in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social : We discuss how the contents of visual perception, imagery, and prediction can be decoded from rhythmic brain activity and argue that such rhythmic representations offer new insights into neural information propagation. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Decoding the rhythmic representation and communication of visual contents

Rhythmic neural activity is considered essential for adaptively modulating responses in the visual system. In this opinion article we posit that visua…

sciencedirect.com

#vsac

VSAC 2025@vsac-social.bsky.social · 2y ago

VSAC 2025: Call for abstracts and symposia! Submit your proposal at 2025.vsac.eu/submission We look forward to hearing about your work! #art #science #visualartofscience #conference #vsac #visualart #artscience #illusionart

Hallo Bluesky! Wir sind die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. #DFG Als Selbstverwaltungsorganisation der #Wissenschaft in Deutschland fördern wir erkenntnisgeleitete #Forschung. Hier erhaltet Ihr Infos u.a. zu Förderangeboten, Ausschreibungen und Anträgen. Wir freuen uns auf den Austausch!

Come work as a postdoctoral researcher in our research group at KU Leuven in Belgium and help us unravel the visual factors underlying aesthetic image preferences! www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

Postdoc position “Visual factors underlying aesthetic image preferences”

Exciting opportunity for a postdoc interested in visual aesthetic preferences!

kuleuven.be