ABSTRACT
The neuropsychology of art and aesthetics studies the effects of brain lesions and diseases on artistic and aesthetic production and appreciation with the goals of understanding their neuroanatomy and using them for diagnosis and treatment. In this chapter, we review what is known about the neuropsychology of art production and appreciation. We rely on illustrative clinical cases and summaries of experiments with samples of patients and healthy control participants. Together, these cases and experiments show, first, that focal brain lesions lead to specific changes in the production and appreciation of art that are consistent with the location of the lesions. For instance, artists with lesions in the right hemisphere might have trouble rendering spatial relations and drawing on the left side of the canvas, whereas people with lesions in the right frontal lobe have problems evaluating conceptual attributes of artworks. Second, they show that neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer or Parkinson’s diseases produce broad changes in painting style and impairs patients’ ability to represent and appreciate certain attributes of artworks. For instance, the style of artists with Alzheimer’s disease tends to gradually become more abstract and less accurate, while people with Parkinson’s disease seem unable to translate pictorial motion cues into motor representations, which diminishes the role those representations play in the appreciation of art.
