In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows (...) into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. -/- . (shrink)

The argument by Mehr et al. that music emerged and evolved culturally as a credible signal is convincing, but it lacks one essential ingredient: a model of signaling behavior that supports the main hypothesis theoretically and empirically. We argue that signaling games can help us explain how musical structures emerge as population-level phenomena, through sender–receiver signaling interactions.

In this chapter we present a new approach to research in music perception allowing one to investigate how musical sound representations are formed in the human brain. By studying subjects' brain responses to unattended stimuli we can determine, for instance, whether neural circuits are more readily activated by musical sounds implicitly learned than by unfamiliar sounds even in non-musicians. Indeed, neuronal populations seem to respond more efficiently to pitch deviations within sound patterns following the rules of Western scale structure, rather (...) than to deviations inside patterns artificially created. Moreover, neural circuits are selectively activated by mistunings inside tonal melodies or by out-of-key chords inside harmonic cadences even when attention is not directed towards the sounds. These data together suggest that incoming sounds are more efficiently processed when they match the neural templates derived from our musical culture. The existence of 'musical memories' in the auditory cortex that are effortlessly activated enabling us, e.g., to identify and recognize speech vs. music sounds can thus be postulated. (shrink)