It’s no sur­prise that per­ceived con­text is impor­tant in influ­enc­ing people’s deci­sions. A recent exper­i­ment has shown that peo­ple rate pic­tures as more aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing (and actu­ally expe­ri­ence more plea­sure while view­ing them) if they believe they come from art gal­leries.

Aes­thetic judg­ments, like most judg­ments, depend on con­text. Whether an object or image is seen in daily life or in an art gallery can sig­nif­i­cantly mod­u­late the aes­thetic value humans attach to it. We inves­ti­gated the neural sys­tem sup­port­ing this mod­u­la­tion by pre­sent­ing human sub­jects with art­works under dif­fer­ent con­texts whilst acquir­ing fMRI data. Using the same data­base of art­works, we ran­domly labelled images as being either sourced from a gallery or com­puter gen­er­ated. Sub­jects’ aes­thetic rat­ings were sig­nif­i­cantly higher for stim­uli viewed in the ‘gallery’ than ‘com­puter’ contexts.

via @vaughanbell