Beauty is commonly used to refer to positive evaluative appraisals that are uniquely human. Little is known, however, about what distinguishes beauty in terms of psychological function or neurobiological mechanisms. Our review describes recent empirical studies and synthesizes what behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscientific experiments have revealed about the nature of beauty. These findings suggest that beauty shares computational mechanisms with other forms of hedonic appraisal of sensory objects but is distinguished by specific conceptual expectations. Specifically, experiencing an object as pleasurable is a prerequisite for judging it to be beautiful; but to qualify as beautiful, an object must elicit especially high levels of pleasure and be matched to internal learned models of what counts as beautiful. We discuss how these empirical findings contradict several assumptions about beauty, including the notion that beauty is disinterested, and that it is specific to Homo sapiens.

中文翻译：

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美的本质：行为、认知和神经生物学

美通常用于指代人类独有的积极评价。然而，人们对心理功能或神经生物学机制方面的美的区别知之甚少。我们的评论描述了最近的实证研究，并综合了行为、认知和神经科学实验揭示的关于美的本质。这些发现表明，美与其他形式的感官对象享乐评价共享计算机制，但以特定的概念期望为特征。具体来说，体验一个物体令人愉悦是判断它是否美丽的先决条件；但要获得美的资格，一个物体必须引起特别高的愉悦感，并与内部学习的美的模型相匹配。