People tend to react slightly more slowly after viewing landscape photographs they find appealing, and their brains show weaker signs of getting ready to move, according to new research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. By recording electrical signals from the scalp while volunteers viewed nature scenes, the researchers found that images people liked more were linked to dampened movement-preparation signals alongside brain rhythms associated with heightened visual engagement. These findings suggest that experiencing beauty may prompt the brain to temporarily shift its resources away from physical action so it can focus more fully on taking in sensory details.
When people encounter an arresting view, such as a mountain range or a striking painting, they often feel momentarily transfixed. Psychologists refer to the mental and emotional evaluation of such sensory experiences as aesthetic appreciation. A central question in neuroscience is how this state of appreciation interacts with motor inhibition, which is the process the brain uses to suppress or hold back physical movement and the preparation to act.
Early brain-scanning research into how people respond to visual art pointed to an intriguing relationship between beauty and the brain regions that control body movement. For instance, a 2004 brain-imaging study found that looking at paintings rated as ugly triggered stronger activity in the motor cortex than looking at paintings rated as beautiful, which some researchers have interpreted as an urge to move away from unpleasant images. A few years later, the authors of a 2007 theoretical paper argued from a different angle that appreciating art actively engages the brain’s movement circuits, proposing that viewers mentally simulate the physical actions, gestures, or brushstrokes depicted in an artwork.
More recent neuroscientific frameworks have sought to reconcile how beauty affects the balance between perceiving the world and acting within it. In a 2020 review, researchers advanced what they call the “Stopping for Knowledge” hypothesis, arguing that the sense of beauty acts as a signal for the brain to temporarily halt physical action so it can redirect its limited processing power toward absorbing new information from the environment. Although earlier experiments using musical chords hinted that pleasant sounds can slow down button presses, researchers had not yet directly tested whether viewing preferred images suppresses the brain’s step-by-step preparation for physical movement.
To examine how visual appreciation affects physical readiness and brain activity, Paolo Barbieri and Irene Ronga of the BraIn Plasticity and behaviour changes Group in the Department of Psychology at the University of Turin and their colleagues, two of whom proposed the “Stopping for Knowledge” hypothesis, conducted two laboratory experiments to test it. The researchers examined whether looking at subjectively appealing photographs would slow down a person’s subsequent physical reactions and dampen the electrical brain signals that build up right before a movement takes place.
“The study was motivated by a theoretical hypothesis about motor inhibition that has received relatively little empirical attention, particularly in the visual domain,” study author Paolo Barbieri told PsyPost. “The idea is that temporarily inhibiting our tendency to act may allow us to focus more fully on a stimulus, giving us the time and resources needed to extract information and process it more thoroughly. We wanted to investigate whether aesthetic appreciation might be associated with this kind of temporary decoupling between perception and action.”
For their experiments, the researchers assembled a collection of 180 black-and-white photographs of natural landscapes, including mountains and seashores. They standardized all the photographs for brightness, contrast, resolution, dimensions, and color spectrum so that basic visual differences would not skew how participants reacted. In the first experiment, 30 right-handed young adults (17 women, with an average age of about 25) sat 80 centimeters from a computer monitor and viewed a random selection of 100 landscape photos one at a time.
Each trial in the first experiment began with a small cross in the center of the screen for 1.5 to 2.5 seconds, followed by a landscape photograph displayed for a random duration between 5 and 6 seconds. Varying the display time prevented participants from predicting the exact moment the image would vanish. Participants were instructed to look at the landscape and press the spacebar as fast as possible the instant the photograph disappeared, and then they had up to 3 seconds to rate how much they liked the image on a scale from 1 (least appreciated) to 9 (most appreciated). On 5 percent of the trials, a static white-noise image appeared instead of a landscape, serving as a check to ensure participants were paying attention and withholding their button presses when instructed.
Before analyzing reaction times, the researchers filtered out trials where participants failed to respond, pressed the key in less than 100 milliseconds, or reacted unusually slowly (removing about 8 percent of trials overall). For each participant, they compared reaction times following the roughly 25 highest-rated landscapes, which received an average score of 7.76 out of 9, against the 25 lowest-rated landscapes, which averaged a score of 3.06.
The results showed that participants reacted more slowly after viewing photographs they found appealing, taking an average of 297 milliseconds to press the spacebar after preferred images compared to 288 milliseconds after non-preferred images. This 9-millisecond slowdown represents roughly a 3.1 percent increase in reaction time, corresponding to a medium-sized statistical effect within participants.
To understand what happens in the brain during this brief delay, the researchers recruited a separate group of 20 right-handed young adults (10 women, with an average age of 25) for a second experiment using electroencephalography (EEG). This technique uses a cap fitted with small sensors on the scalp to measure electrical activity generated by the brain down to the millisecond. Participants completed four blocks of 80 trials, viewing the same set of 80 landscape images four times across the session, with each photo displayed for a fixed duration of 5 seconds.
Instead of reacting to the disappearance of the photograph, participants in the second experiment waited for a colored circle, acting like a traffic light, to appear on the screen right after the landscape vanished. When a green circle appeared, which happened on 75 percent of the trials (240 target trials per person), participants had to press the spacebar as quickly as possible and then rate the photograph on the 1-to-9 scale. When a red circle appeared on the remaining 25 percent of trials, they had to hold back their button press. Keeping the viewing time fixed at 5 seconds before the traffic light cue appeared allowed the scientists to track how the brain prepared to make a movement while the participant was still looking at the landscape.
The behavioral results of the second experiment echoed those of the first. Participants rated their top cluster of roughly 80 preferred trials at an average of 7.56 and their bottom cluster of 80 non-preferred trials at 3.54, and they were once again slower to press the spacebar after looking at preferred landscapes. Average reaction times were 504 milliseconds following preferred images compared to 497 milliseconds following non-preferred images, a 7-millisecond delay (or about 1.4 percent slower) that reflected a medium statistical effect. Overall reaction times were about 200 milliseconds longer in the second experiment than in the first, likely because participants had to identify the color of the traffic light before deciding whether to respond.
When the researchers examined the EEG recordings, they focused first on the readiness potential, a slow buildup of negative electrical voltage across the front and central areas of the scalp that naturally begins one to two seconds before a person performs a physical action. Larger readiness potentials generally indicate stronger preparation to move and tend to accompany faster reaction times. During the final moments of viewing preferred landscapes, specifically between 73 and 14 milliseconds before the traffic light cue appeared, this electrical buildup was noticeably smaller than when participants viewed non-preferred landscapes.
This dampening of movement-related brain activity continued even after the green traffic light appeared on the screen. Electrical brain responses linked to evaluating the green cue (occurring between 290 and 470 milliseconds after the light appeared) and physically executing the key press (between 660 and 1,010 milliseconds) were also reduced following preferred photographs. When the authors analyzed all trials individually without grouping them into categories, they found a consistent relationship across the entire rating scale: the higher a participant rated a specific landscape, the weaker their brain’s movement-preparation and execution signals tended to be.
“One of the reviewers suggested an additional analysis examining the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and neural responses on a trial-by-trial basis,” Barbieri explained. “Initially, I thought the effect might be driven mainly by the contrast between highly appreciated and poorly appreciated images, with intermediate ratings potentially obscuring the relationship. I was genuinely surprised to find that our brain responses were modulated so precisely and parametrically by our subjective preferences.”
In a final step, the team analyzed how the power of rhythmic brain waves, measured in cycles per second (hertz), shifted over time. They looked closely at alpha waves (8 to 12 hertz), which typically drop in power when the visual areas of the brain are actively focused on processing sights, and beta waves (roughly 20 to 33 hertz), which tend to surge in power when the brain is actively holding back physical movement. About two seconds before the traffic light cue appeared, viewing preferred landscapes produced both a steeper drop in alpha wave power and a stronger surge in beta wave power compared to viewing non-preferred landscapes, followed by another beta wave increase roughly 410 to 460 milliseconds after the cue. The authors interpret these rhythmic patterns as a sign that appealing images heighten visual attention while putting the brakes on motor planning.
“I think our findings offer an interesting perspective on how perception and the motor system bidirectionally interact,” Barbieri said. “They suggest that when we engage with something we appreciate, our tendency to act immediately may slow down, allowing us to focus on and explore what is in front of us. More broadly, this raises the possibility that a mindset oriented toward learning, exploration, and change may benefit from temporarily stepping away from more immediate, pragmatic goals.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. First, the reaction time delays observed after viewing preferred images were only 7 to 9 milliseconds on average. The effect is subtle, and the motor system is not shut off during aesthetic experiences. As the authors point out, holding back outward movement can happen at the same time that a viewer mentally simulates actions on the inside, and dynamic art forms like dance performances or energetic paintings may engage the motor system differently than calm black-and-white nature photographs.
“The differences in reaction times were small, amounting to fractions of a second,” Barbieri noted. “At first glance, this might seem to have little practical significance. However, perception–action cycles occur continuously throughout our daily lives, second after second. Even small shifts in how these cycles unfold may accumulate over time and reflect qualitatively different ways of engaging with the world.”
The laboratory setup also differs from how people usually experience art and nature in the real world. Viewing standardized grayscale photographs on a computer screen for five seconds at a time, and seeing the same images repeated four times across the second experiment, does not capture the complexity or emotional depth of walking through an art gallery or standing in front of a real landscape. In addition, the experiments tested relatively small groups of 30 and 20 young adults, so future studies with larger and more diverse samples will be helpful to confirm how broadly these patterns apply.
Because preference was based on participants’ own ratings rather than assigned by the researchers, the comparisons show how reactions varied alongside liking rather than proving that liking itself caused the slowdown. Other qualities of the favored images could also have played a role, despite the researchers’ efforts to standardize basic visual features.
“An important point is that aesthetic appreciation was measured through subjective ratings, independently of the images’ features,” Barbieri added. “In other words, we were interested in how much participants personally appreciated each image, rather than assuming that certain visual properties are inherently more beautiful than others. Our findings therefore concern the relationship between individual aesthetic preferences and motor responses, rather than a universal response to objectively beautiful images.”
Finally, although the brain wave recordings suggest that participants paid closer visual attention to preferred images while suppressing movement preparation, the experiments did not directly measure whether participants actually learned or remembered more information from those scenes. Alpha and beta brain waves are broad signals that can reflect several overlapping mental processes during a task, and future work will also need to explore how split-second, automatic impressions of beauty compare to deliberate ratings over longer periods of time.
“My next goal is to bring together different aspects of this framework within a single experiment,” Barbieri said. “In particular, I would like to investigate whether the decoupling between perception and action is accompanied by a greater predisposition to learn from and attend to the surrounding environment. This would help us understand whether motor inhibition is part of a broader state that facilitates exploration and information gathering.”
“More broadly, this study is part of a research program that views aesthetic experience as a possible way of navigating sensory uncertainty through curiosity rather than anxiety,” Barbieri concluded. “When we encounter something unfamiliar or unpredictable, we may experience uncertainty as a source of discomfort, or we may become curious and motivated to explore it. We are interested in understanding how aesthetic experiences might facilitate the latter response, fostering an openness to new information and learning. This perspective is also explored in our previous work.”
The study, “The gentle grip of beauty: Neural bases of motor inhibition during aesthetic appreciation,” was authored by Paolo Barbieri, Jacopo Frascaroli, Greta Varesio, Francesca Piovesan, Ludovico Bechis, Pietro Sarasso, and Irene Ronga.