Several views on aesthetic preference have been developed during the last century, including Psychoanalysis, Gestalt theory and Empirical Aesthetics. Within the last of these, aesthetic preference has been related with arousal (Berlyne, 1970, 1971), prototypicality (Martindale, 1988; Martindale et al., 1988), and appraisals (Silvia, 2005), among other factors. Potentially, any of these perspectives could serve to ground our interpretation of neuroimaging results. However, given that the present work aims to provide a tentative relation between neural activity and cognitive processes, we need a model that specifies the cognitive operations underlying aesthetic preference, as well as their interactions, and that, at the same time, can bridge the cognitive-neural levels
