ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses aesthetics and art appreciation from an information-processing viewpoint. It proposes an approach that further tries to enlighten essential cognitive and emotional processes that occur in the perceiver during an aesthetic experience. The chapter examines a model of cognitive processing stages involved in art appreciation that considers affordances that artworks and particularly contemporary artworks pose. Historically, empirical aesthetics is among the most traditional fields in experimental psychology. Top-down cognitive processes affect most processing levels. As style-related processing seems to be an essential feature of art appreciation, it is proposed that psychological research in aesthetics should particularly focus on this kind of processing. Once experimental research has shown what processes are involved, a next step has to identify the relation between rewarding-centers of the brain and elements of aesthetic processing. Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists mainly focus on visual properties of artworks and aspects of cognitive and affective processing.
