Interpretation of modern art masterpieces:

no motor reflection

P.B. PASCOLO*, A. BUCCI**

* Department of Bioengineering of International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM), Udine, Italy
** Department of Bioengineering, University of Udine, Italy

Summary

Progress in Neuroscience 2020; 5 (1-4): 47-58.

In the article we present conceptual counter-arguments to the embodiement role claim, even when motor areas of the brain are activated and, as a pilot case, resume and reproduce the experiment at the base of one of the seminal work about mirror neurons and neuroaesthetics, slightly modifying its measurement protocol and considerably increasing its statistical population. This new study suggests that the aesthetic experience is so strongly affected by cultural and experiential backgrounds of the beholder that somato-motor resonance effects, if any, seem to be undetectable and, so far, unprovable. Recent trends in neuroaesthetics postulate a nexus between dramaticity, sense of movement, in static works of visual art, beholder’s aesthetic experience and embodied simulation mechanisms, the rationale being an asserted twofold motor resonance induced in the observer by the dynamic content of the works and by recognizable traces of the artist’s creative gestures. Trying to cope with the effects of the subjective cultural conditioning, some pioneering studies have focused on the beholder’s differential response to works of abstract art compared to less motor-evocative, computer-made images. Using the same method reported by Umiltà et al. (2012) in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, as a major result, those investigations don’t contradict the embodied simulation hypothesis but they also don’t prove it definitively. Here the authors present conceptual counter-arguments to the embodiement role claim, even when motor areas of the brain are activated and, as a pilot case, resume and reproduce the experiment at the base of one of the seminal work, slightly modifying its measurement protocol and considerably increasing its statistical population. This new study suggests that the aesthetic experience is so strongly affected by cultural and experiential backgrounds of the beholder that somato-motor resonance effects, if any, seem to be undetectable and, so far, unprovable.

KEY WORDS: Embodied simulation, Experiment, Falsification, Mirror neurons, Neuroaesthetics.

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