Event-related brain potentials as a point of entry into the integrated analysis of the cognitive and affective bases of perceptual and aesthetic experiences.

Summary This review has as a starting point Berlyne's attempt to place art within a biological perspective linking aesthetic behaviour to exploration and suggesting that the artistic activity grows out of a fundamental characteristic of the human nervous system, the psychophysiological concept of "arousal", closely related to "collative" features of information. Then, it proposes that Event-related potentials of the brain (ERPs) is a reliable method to objectively investigating the way the individual derives information, that is, knowledge, from his/her environment. For this, ERPs are seen as strictly interwoven with cognitive psychology conceptualization of "schema", proposed by Neisser in his theory of "perceptual cycle", as related to its biological founding of the limbic system, seen as a holistic functional unit, in which the hippocampus is seen as the integrative neurophysiological substratum of cognition, emotion, and motivation. It is concluded that, using ERPs as quantifiable measures of human cognition and emotion we can not only help to test existing theories of cognition, but we can also help to build new and more heuristic ones, for predicting a perceiver's behaviour for a number of diverse areas related to perception and aesthetics.