Bullot & Reber (B&R) have made the provocative argument that as programs of research, empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics have neglected viewers' sensitivities to artworks' historical contexts. Therefore, these fields have failed as scientific explorations of art appreciation. In contrast, we argue that empirical studies of the psychology and neurology of art have made substantial contributions to our understanding of art appreciation precisely because work in both domains reflects deep concerns about viewers' sensitivities to artworks' historical contexts. To support our argument, we review pertinent research on two central themes and close by addressing our current understanding of how the mind and/or brain perceives art.

The first central theme involves an acknowledgment that every time a subject generates a response (e.g., beauty judgment or preference rating) to an artwork in a psychological study of art, the response reflects not only the proximal cognitive and emotional processes that underlie it, but also their distal developmental (including educational) histories. For example, when a subject with expertise in the visual arts makes a judgment of beauty in relation to a stimulus, his/her developmental history is embodied in that response. In fact, precisely because expertise (in art training and/or viewing) has been shown to be a strong determinant of art perception (Hekkert & van Wieringen Reference Hekkert and van Wieringen1996b; see also work on expertise and musical judgment by Müller et al. Reference Müller, Höfel, Brattico and Jacobsen2010), it has been incorporated as a key variable in major contemporary theories of aesthetic judgment (e.g., Leder et al. Reference Leder, Belke, Oeberst and Augustin2004) and creativity (Kaufman & Baer Reference Kaufman and Baer2012). Essentially, empirical studies of aesthetic judgment must either explicitly control level(s) of expertise or include it as a variable of interest into the design of the study. The same is true when neuroscientists study brain activation in relation to viewing stimuli in the scanner: activation in any given system in relation to ratings is modulated by the developmental history of the viewer. As such, studies must explicitly address the level of expertise and/or art training in their sample, for example by selecting “naïve” viewers' exclusively – (e.g., Munar et al. Reference Munar, Nadal, Rosselló, Flexas, Moratti, Maestú, Marty and Cela-Conde2012). In this sense, it is understood that psychological and neural responses to art by definition embody the developmental histories of their viewers, including their differential interactions with stimulus features.

The second central theme – and perhaps an issue more germane to B&R's thesis – involves an acknowledgment that psychological and neural responses to art also embody the perceived histories of their target stimuli. For example, there is good evidence to demonstrate that title information about the sources of paintings influences viewers' responses (Leder et al. Reference Leder, Carbon and Ripsas2006). Complementing this behavioral evidence, there is now neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that such source information also influences subjects' neural responses to artworks. For example, Kirk et al. (Reference Kirk, Skov, Hulme, Christensen and Zeki2009) presented subjects in the fMRI scanner with artworks that were randomly labeled as being either sourced from a gallery or computer generated. As expected, aesthetic ratings were significantly higher for stimuli believed to be sourced from a gallery. Critically, this contextual manipulation moderated activity in the medial orbitofrontal and prefrontal cortex. These data demonstrate that psychological and neural responses are sensitive to the manipulations of the histories of their target stimuli.

At a more general level, B&R are quite correct in noting that empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics seek to discover and establish universal laws – linking systematic variations in features of artworks to systematic variations in our psychological and neural responses to them (Martindale Reference Martindale1990). This effort has shown that the ways in which we respond to artworks is built on much of the same cognitive and neural architecture that defines our interactions with non-artworks. For example, regions in the medial orbitofrontal cortex that respond to beauty in faces also respond to beauty in paintings and music (Ishizu & Zeki Reference Ishizu and Zeki2012). Likewise, regions in the fusiform gyrus that respond to beauty in faces respond to preference for artworks (Vartanian & Goel Reference Vartanian and Goel2004). Evolutionarily, this makes sense: why evolve a completely separate, specialized “module” for art perception when existing brain systems can be co-opted and dynamically reconfigured to compute our responses to artworks? This realization is highly relevant to the way in which researchers in empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics consider historical context as perceived by art historians in their studies of art appreciation. Namely, historical context as perceived by art historians is only part of a multilayered cascade of responses, and its contribution likely not greater than the contribution of dynamically reconfigured and evolutionarily-adapted neural and psychological mechanisms.