Culture and Aesthetic Preference: Comparing the Attention to Context of East Asians and Americans

We believe that two fundamental developments afforded researchers a third chance to consolidate the field of neuroaesthet- ics around the turn of the millennium. First, the notion of a single special mechanism underlying aesthetic experiences has been dropped in favor of the view that aesthetic appreciation and re- lated phenomena rely on several general mechanisms, including processes of perception, memory, attention, decision-making, and reward and emotion (Chatterjee, 2004a; Leder, Belke, Oeberst, & Augustin, 2004). Given what we know of the neural correlates of such processes, it follows that aesthetic experiences must emerge from the dynamic interaction of activity in multiple brain regions at different time frames....