Empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics study two main issues: the valuation of sensory objects and art experience. These two issues are often treated as if they were intrinsically interrelated: Research on art experience focuses on how art elicits aesthetic pleasure, and research on valuation focuses on special categories of objects or emotional processes that determine the aesthetic experience. This entanglement hampers progress in empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics and limits their relevance to other domains of psychology and neuroscience. Substantial progress in these fields is possible only if research on aesthetics is disentangled from research on art. We define aesthetics as the study of how and why sensory stimuli acquire hedonic value. Under this definition, aesthetics becomes a fundamental topic for psychology and neuroscience because it links hedonics (the study of what hedonic valuation is in itself) and neuroeconomics (the study of how hedonic values are integrated into decision making and behavioral control). We also propose that this definition of aesthetics leads to concrete empirical questions, such as how perceptual information comes to engage value signals in the reward circuit or why different psychological and neurobiological factors elicit different appreciation events for identical sensory objects.

中文翻译：

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告别艺术：美学作为心理学和神经科学的主题。

经验美学和神经美学研究了两个主要问题：感觉物体的估价和艺术经验。这两个问题通常被视为在本质上是相互联系的：对艺术体验的研究集中于艺术如何唤起审美愉悦，对价值的研究则集中于确定审美体验的特定类别的物体或情感过程。这种纠缠阻碍了经验美学和神经美学的发展，并限制了它们与心理学和神经科学其他领域的相关性。只有将美学研究与艺术研究脱钩，才能在这些领域取得实质性进展。我们将美学定义为对感官刺激如何以及为何获得享乐价值的研究。根据这个定义，美学成为心理学和神经科学的基本主题，因为它将享乐主义（对享乐价值本身的研究）与神经经济学（将享乐价值如何整合到决策和行为控制中的研究）联系在一起。我们还提出，对美学的定义引发了具体的经验问题，例如知觉信息如何将价值信号引入奖励电路中，或者为什么不同的心理和神经生物学因素会导致相同的感官对象发生不同的欣赏事件。