Indeterminate Artworks and the Human Brain

Abstract

What happens in our brain when we look at indeterminate art works? A unique collaboration between an artist and a neuroscientist resulted in a series of behavioral and functional brain imaging studies. The main findings suggest that when confronted with indeterminate visual input, the human brain automatically solves the perceptual dilemma by generating predictions about their content, based on familiar associations stored in memory. Viewing art is therefore not a passive process, but rather a dynamic cognitive function that engages distributed cortical networks activated during the allocation of attention, mental imagery, and retrieval from memory.