Philipp Flieger¹, Rico Stecher¹, Daniel Kaiser^1,2; ¹Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics, Geography, Justus Liebig University Gießen, Germany, ²Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior, Justus Liebig University Gießen, Philipps University Marburg and Technical University Darmstadt, Germany

How does neural activity give rise to the perception of beauty in our environment? Previous EEG work suggests neural representations of beauty emerge during early perceptual processing and are temporally sustained. Complementary fMRI work pinpoints the neural correlates of beauty to visual, frontal, and default-mode network (DMN) areas. An integrated view of the spatiotemporal dynamics that give rise to the perception of beauty, however, is lacking. In separate EEG (N = 52) and fMRI (N = 29) studies, participants rated the beauty of 100 scene photographs. We then performed a model-based EEG-fMRI fusion to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of beauty-related representations. Specifically, we obtained the representational similarities between EEG responses at every time point and representational similarities between fMRI responses for 100 brain parcels. We then determined how much of the correspondence between EEG and fMRI-derived similarities is explained by beauty ratings. Our results suggest that representations underlying beauty judgments emerge early (peaking at 275ms post-onset), are long-lasting, and span visual, frontal, and DMN areas. This spatiotemporal signature remained robust when controlling for image-quality ratings (obtained separately, N = 43). When additionally controlling for visual features extracted by a VGG16 deepnet model, we found strongly reduced beauty-related activations, particularly in visual cortex. Conversely, beauty-related activations in frontal and DMN regions remained relatively unaffected. These representations still emerged remarkably fast (within 225ms). We conclude that the perception of beauty involves rapid and spatiotemporally sustained processing related to visual correlates of beauty, while the DMN concurrently forms more abstract representations of beauty.