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Neuroaesthetics and Autism: How We Experience Art Differently
Written by EVOAUTISM Foundation
Two people can stand in front of the same painting and notice entirely different things.
One looks first at a face. Another notices a repeated pattern, an unusual color, the geometry of the composition, or a small detail near the edge of the image. One person moves on after a few seconds. Another stays.
The object is the same. The experience is different.
Neuroaesthetics is one field trying to understand why. It studies how the brain and mind respond to art, music, architecture and other aesthetic experiences. Research connecting neuroaesthetics and autism raises another question: can differences in perception and attention affect the way people experience art?
A visitor at Wellcome Collection, London. Photo: Wellcome Collection / Ben Gilbert.
Early neuroaesthetics research often focused on beauty: what happens in the brain when we find something beautiful, and whether similar processes appear across different forms of art.
The field has since expanded. Neuroscientists Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian describe aesthetic experience as an interaction between sensory and motor processing, emotional evaluation, and knowledge [1]. Our response to an artwork can depend on what we see as well as memory, familiarity and context.
This makes aesthetic experience highly personal.
A study by Edward Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin offer one example [2]. Participants viewed artworks during brain imaging and rated how strongly each image affected them. Artworks that produced the strongest responses were associated with activity in parts of the default mode network, which is involved in internally directed and self-referential thought.
The researchers suggested that a strong response to art can become connected with personal relevance. An image can interact with memories and associations that another visitor does not share.
This is one reason two people can spend the same amount of time in the same gallery and leave with different impressions.
The field has since expanded. Neuroscientists Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian describe aesthetic experience as an interaction between sensory and motor processing, emotional evaluation, and knowledge [1]. Our response to an artwork can depend on what we see as well as memory, familiarity and context.
This makes aesthetic experience highly personal.
A study by Edward Vessel, G. Gabrielle Starr and Nava Rubin offer one example [2]. Participants viewed artworks during brain imaging and rated how strongly each image affected them. Artworks that produced the strongest responses were associated with activity in parts of the default mode network, which is involved in internally directed and self-referential thought.
The researchers suggested that a strong response to art can become connected with personal relevance. An image can interact with memories and associations that another visitor does not share.
This is one reason two people can spend the same amount of time in the same gallery and leave with different impressions.
Installation view of Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Four Domes Pavilion, National Museum in Wrocław, 2024. Photo: Magdalena Lorek.
Research on autistic perception has found differences in sensory processing, visual attention and the way local details and larger visual information are processed. There is considerable variation between autistic people, and researchers continue to study how these patterns relate to everyday experience.
Only a small number of studies have examined autism and art perception directly.
Current research suggests that autistic and non-autistic participants may differ in some aspects of visual attention, aesthetic judgment and neural response to art. The evidence is still limited and does not support the idea of one universal autistic way of experiencing art.
Only a small number of studies have examined autism and art perception directly.
Current research suggests that autistic and non-autistic participants may differ in some aspects of visual attention, aesthetic judgment and neural response to art. The evidence is still limited and does not support the idea of one universal autistic way of experiencing art.
Photovoice exhibition at ArtsXchange, East Point, Georgia, Morehouse School of Medicine
In a 2018 fMRI study, 17 autistic participants and 19 non-autistic participants evaluated landscape and fractal images [3]. The groups gave similar ratings to the landscapes, while autistic participants rated the fractal images lower. The researchers also found differences in brain activity during aesthetic judgment, including activity in areas involved in visual and spatial processing.
What does research say about autism and art perception?
The sample was small and included people aged 15 to 22, so the findings cannot tell us how autistic people in general respond to art.
A 2020 experiment approached the question through eye tracking [4]. Ten autistic and ten non-autistic participants viewed classical sculptures with original or altered body proportions and answered questions about beauty, liking and proportion.
Their behavioral ratings differed in some conditions. The gaze data were less straightforward. During the subjective liking task, the main eye-tracking measures did not differ between groups. During an objective beauty task, non-autistic participants spent longer looking at faces.
What participants said about an image and where they looked were therefore separate sources of information.
A larger study published in 2023 included 107 autistic young people and 145 non-autistic participants [5]. They rated paintings that art experts had previously classified as higher or lower quality. Both groups distinguished between the categories, although the difference in ratings was smaller among autistic participants.
The authors considered whether greater reliance on deliberate evaluation could help explain the result. That remains an interpretation of the findings. It does not establish that autistic people generally make aesthetic judgments in a more deliberate way.
The studies use different images, tasks and methods, and their results do not point to a single pattern.
That uncertainty is useful. It moves the question away from trying to define an "autistic aesthetic" and toward examining the many processes involved when a person encounters an artwork.
A 2020 experiment approached the question through eye tracking [4]. Ten autistic and ten non-autistic participants viewed classical sculptures with original or altered body proportions and answered questions about beauty, liking and proportion.
Their behavioral ratings differed in some conditions. The gaze data were less straightforward. During the subjective liking task, the main eye-tracking measures did not differ between groups. During an objective beauty task, non-autistic participants spent longer looking at faces.
What participants said about an image and where they looked were therefore separate sources of information.
A larger study published in 2023 included 107 autistic young people and 145 non-autistic participants [5]. They rated paintings that art experts had previously classified as higher or lower quality. Both groups distinguished between the categories, although the difference in ratings was smaller among autistic participants.
The authors considered whether greater reliance on deliberate evaluation could help explain the result. That remains an interpretation of the findings. It does not establish that autistic people generally make aesthetic judgments in a more deliberate way.
The studies use different images, tasks and methods, and their results do not point to a single pattern.
That uncertainty is useful. It moves the question away from trying to define an "autistic aesthetic" and toward examining the many processes involved when a person encounters an artwork.
Who is the average museum visitor?
Museums make decisions about attention all the time.
Curators decide which works receive visual priority. Exhibition designers arrange images, text, lighting and space. Architects influence how visitors enter a room, move through it and approach an object.
These choices usually assume that visitors will respond to certain cues in broadly predictable ways.
Real visitors are harder to predict.
Visitors examining a painting at close range. Courtesy Christie’s Education, 2019.
What could neuroaesthetics mean for museums?
One autistic visitor may notice a detail that the curator considered secondary. Another may attend to pattern or spatial structure before narrative information. For someone with sensory sensitivities, light, sound or the number of people in a room may affect how easily they can concentrate on the artwork.
Other autistic visitors may experience the same exhibition in ways that look very similar to those of non-autistic visitors.
Neuroaesthetics cannot tell a museum what every visitor will see or feel. Existing autism-specific studies are too limited for that, and laboratory experiments cannot reproduce the full experience of entering a museum with its architecture, sounds, crowds and personal associations.
They can, however, make one assumption difficult to defend: people standing in front of the same object are not necessarily processing the same information in the same way.
That matters when museums think about neurodiversity. Accessibility is often discussed in terms of physical access or separate accommodations. Perception raises another issue: exhibition design itself depends on ideas about how attention works.
A visitor who follows a different visual path through an exhibition has still encountered the exhibition. A detail the curator considered peripheral may become central to someone else's experience. Meaning does not always begin where the wall text expects it to begin.
The question is therefore larger than how an autistic visitor responds to a painting.
How many different ways of seeing is a cultural space prepared to recognize?
Other autistic visitors may experience the same exhibition in ways that look very similar to those of non-autistic visitors.
Neuroaesthetics cannot tell a museum what every visitor will see or feel. Existing autism-specific studies are too limited for that, and laboratory experiments cannot reproduce the full experience of entering a museum with its architecture, sounds, crowds and personal associations.
They can, however, make one assumption difficult to defend: people standing in front of the same object are not necessarily processing the same information in the same way.
That matters when museums think about neurodiversity. Accessibility is often discussed in terms of physical access or separate accommodations. Perception raises another issue: exhibition design itself depends on ideas about how attention works.
A visitor who follows a different visual path through an exhibition has still encountered the exhibition. A detail the curator considered peripheral may become central to someone else's experience. Meaning does not always begin where the wall text expects it to begin.
The question is therefore larger than how an autistic visitor responds to a painting.
How many different ways of seeing is a cultural space prepared to recognize?
01
What is neuroaesthetics? Neuroaesthetics studies how the brain and mind respond to art, beauty and other aesthetic experiences, including music, architecture and visual environments.
03
Why does neuroaesthetics matter for museums? It can help museums consider how attention, sensory processing and personal experience influence the way different visitors encounter artworks and exhibition spaces.
02
Do autistic people experience art differently? Some studies have found differences in visual attention, aesthetic judgment and brain activity between autistic and non-autistic participants. Research remains limited, and there is no evidence for one universal autistic way of experiencing art.
