Arts Management Commons^™

Art For Reward's Sake: Visual Art Recruits The Ventral Striatum, Simon Lacey, Henrik Hagvedt, Vanessa Patrick, Amy Anderson, Randall Stilla, Gopikrishna Deshpande, Hu Xioping, Joao Sato, Srinivas K. Reddy, Krish Sathian

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A recent study showed that people evaluate products more positively when they are physically associated with art images than similar non-art images. Neuroimaging studies of visual art have investigated artistic style and esthetic preference but not brain responses attributable specifically to the artistic status of images. Here we tested the hypothesis that the artistic status of images engages reward circuitry, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during viewing of art and non-art images matched for content. Subjects made animacy judgments in response to each image. Relative to non-art images, art images activated, on both subject- and item-wise analyses, reward-related …