ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews facts from paleoanthropology and comparative neuroscience, which should be accounted for by hypotheses about the evolution of art and aesthetic appreciation. The orbitofrontal cortex presumably supports the representation of reward value of visual stimuli during aesthetic-judgment tasks. To consider language, moral reasoning, or aesthetic appreciation as single and unitary cognitive processes may suggest that each of these cognitive faculties owes to a single, separate piece of computing machinery. Studies such as those highlighted a starting point for hypotheses about the evolution of aesthetic preference, because they provide an initial sketch of the modifications that the neural underpinnings of this cognitive faculty have undergone during human evolution. Occipital visual areas, whose activity during aesthetic preference has been interpreted as the correlate of emotional or attentional engagement, show a mosaic of novel and primitive features.
