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Abstract:
The scientific study of beauty began with Fechner less than200 years ago and has matured over the past two decades. Inparticular, two strands of research are yielding insight intoseveral aspects of the experience of beauty. Stimulus-focusedstudies have determined key object properties that, on aver-age, increase or decrease the attractiveness or beauty of anobject, such as symmetry and curvature. Response-focusedstudies have started to describe the processes that underlieaesthetic pleasure and beauty and their neural correlatesindependent of stimulus properties. So far, research indicatesthat the feeling of beauty requires successful early sensoryprocessing and that there is an especially tight, linear relationbetween beauty and pleasure responses.
