“When cheesecake craving unplugs the pleasure button: understanding aesthetics and quality of experience in a computer generated graphics” by Mansilla, Puig, Perkis and Ebrahimi

Some studies claim that the creation and experience of art is an innate capacity that evolved to meet various needs of human survival and reproduction. Steven Pinker for instance argues that an aesthetic stimuli is comparable to strawberry cheesecake which are “mega doses of agreeable stimuli” and are made for the instant purpose of “pressing our pleasure buttons”. However, an experience of art is more than just the by-products of innate pleasure circuits; there are factors that draw an individual to them. In our previous study we observed that implicit experiences (IE) lead to a positive evaluation of Quality of Experience (QoE) [Mansilla et al., 2011]. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that aesthetic experience is in part modulated by human nature. For instance, during craving, strong mental thoughts involving vivid associations of imagery (of the craved item) associated with pleasurable sensations and eventually leading to distress due to prolonged deficit, are most evident.

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