Abstract: Neuroaesthetics adopts the technology of neuroscience to explore the mechanisms of aesthetic experience. This paper describes the psychological principles and neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience in terms of cognitive processing. Previous research findings show that the functional brain areas related to aesthetic processing involve sensation, perception, motion, emotion and rewarding systems, and that the three main topics of neuroaethetics are truth-beauty, disembodied-embodied cognition and cognition-emotion. Moreover, future researches in neuroaesthetics should investigate the time course and dynamic properties of aesthetic experience, as well as the general principles of neuroaesthetics from the cross-artistic and cross-cultural perspectives.

Key words: neuroaesthetics, aesthetic experience, art