The embodied artistic appreciation and production in professional artists

For at least the past 40000 years, humanity has been admiring and creating works of art. According to alternative neurocognitive models, the foundations of art appreciation and creation may rely on mechanisms of motor and empathic resonance with the pieces of art and with the feelings and actions of the artist who created them (embodied hypothesis) or on perceptual learning and inhibitory control (predictive coding and inhibitory hypothesis). This second view de-emphasizes the role of motor simulation in aesthetic appreciation in favor of processing sensory stimuli that are not adequately explained by predictions and carry potential learnable information: inhibitory control would facilitate prediction updating promoting learning dynamics. No neuroimaging study so far has directly challenged these alternative hypotheses, but the study of professional artists constitutes the perfect test case as contrasting predictions can be anticipated by comparing the neurofunctional responses during the observation of own vs. other artists’ paintings. On the one hand, self-generated paintings should induce stronger motor resonance due to the greater availability of the motor representations of the gestures performed to realize brushstrokes on the canvas. On the other hand, individuals usually generate better predictions for forthcoming outcomes for their own actions than those of others; thus, observing others’ paintings should reflect in enhanced perceptual uncertainty and lead to a stronger need for inhibition to allow for perceptual learning. We recruited a sample of professional artists who performed two tasks during fMRI scans. In one task they observed and mentally expressed aesthetic judgments on their own paintings or paintings made by other artists (aesthetic appreciation task). In another one, they had to mentally recall the moments when they conceived their own artworks or, as a control condition, when they visited now-familiar places for the first time (mental recall task). We found that appreciation of one’s own compared with others’ artworks was associated with a greater recruitment of action-related insular, parietal, and occipito-temporal brain regions, suggesting that the observation of own paintings automatically triggers mental representations of the gestures needed to produce them. Similarly, recalling the moments of art creation, compared with the control task, was associated with greater recruitment of fronto-parietal regions of the action-observation mirror network. While previous literature suggests that inhibitory mechanisms contribute to aesthetic appreciation and the generation of new ideas in naïve individuals, the embodied simulation may be the fingerprint of artistic expertise in both art-making and art-viewing.