Several of the conference’s participants presented the results of fMRI studies of participants performing aesthetic appreciation tasks. As in other areas of neuroscience, however, blobs of signifi- cant BOLD response tell us little unless one really understands their relation to the cognitive and affective processes involved in the specific task. Helmut Leder’s contribution to the conference, Why do we like art? Psychological explanations, described a five- stage psychological model of aesthetic appreciation, and argued that it can function as an interpretative framework for neuroimag- ing and brain-damage studies
