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Fakes and Forgeries in the Brain Scanner

- Andrew Parker

When we go to an art gallery, there are usually details about the artworks written on labels on the walls. These labels have been specially prepared by experts to give us their opinions about the art objects. We thought that most people believe what is written on those labels, and we wanted to understand how powerful these opinions could be. So, we put people into a brain scanner to measure their brain responses while they received different opinions about the same pictures. For this research, we used portrait paintings by the famous Dutch artist Rembrandt. Sometimes, we told our viewers that the portrait was a genuine Rembrandt and sometimes we told them the portrait was a fake. When we analyzed the brain responses, the most interesting responses were found when people were told that the paintings were fake. Two parts of the brain, one involved in strategic planning (called the frontopolar cortex) and one involved in vision (called the occipital cortex), seemed to work together when people thought the paintings were fake.

License information: CC BY 4.0
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00039

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