On self-relevance as the core of aesthetic judgement and its machine boundary

In the two previous texts in this series, I maintained two points. First, that aesthetic comprehension rests upon regimes of relevance, and that misunderstanding—between cultures, between humans and machines—is a misalignment of those regimes. Second, that the divergence between human and machine attention is measurable and concentrates where human relevance ceases to be formal and becomes social, semantic, or vital. That second text concluded with an honest caveat: the social component of the divergence is well-documented, but the self-referential component—the vital weight, that which touches the self—remained, in my argument, more an inference than an established result.

This text addresses exactly that piece. The question is concrete: what makes a work not only appear beautiful or interesting to us, but also matter to us? My thesis, supported by recent empirical research, is that the best candidate to explain this leap is self-relevance: the degree to which a work enters into a relationship with the observer's memory, identity, and history. Not form itself, not mere processing fluency, not novelty: self-relevance. And I maintain that this mechanism is precisely what a system without a self cannot replicate, not due to a transient technical limitation, but because it lacks that in relation to which something could be self-relevant.

A clarification of scope is necessary from the outset, as it marks the difference between rigour and enthusiasm. The available evidence is promising but not yet conclusive. It strongly supports the view that self-relevance explains the most intense and memorable forms of aesthetic judgement. It does not yet demonstrate that all aesthetic valuation depends upon it. I shall maintain this distinction throughout the text.

1. The third stratum, once more

In the first text of this series, I distinguished three strata of aesthetic relevance. Formal salience—what stands out perceptually: colour, contrast, rhythm, composition. Historical-contextual pertinence—authorship, technique, tradition, intention; that which is only perceived by knowing the origin of the work. And vital weight—that which touches memory, identity, attachment, vulnerability; that which makes something not only informatively rich, but existentially important.

The first stratum is well-studied and is, in part, modelable: salience systems reasonably predict where a human looks for physical reasons. The second is the classic territory of art history and aesthetics. The third is the most difficult to operationalise, and therefore the easiest to treat with romantic vagueness. The contribution of recent research is to have begun to measure it.

The term that the literature offers to approach the third stratum is self-relevance, and the behavioural phenomenon that allows for its study is the self-reference effect: the memory advantage that appears when we process information in relation to ourselves. It is a robust and long-standing effect in cognitive psychology: we remember words, images, and facts that we have related to our own person better than those we have processed neutrally. The hypothesis that runs through this text is that this same mechanism operates at the heart of intense aesthetic judgement.

2. What the evidence shows, without exaggeration

Four studies mark the current state of the matter, and it is advisable to read them together because their value lies in how they correct one another.

The first is a null result, and it is important precisely for that reason. Kasdan and Belfi (2020) investigated the self-reference effect in music: they asked participants to judge brief instrumental fragments according to how much they liked them—a condition linked to the self—versus other conditions, and subsequently measured recognition. No self-referential advantage appeared. The simple musical "I like it" was insufficient to produce the effect. This result establishes a boundary: not every aesthetic judgment recruits the self, and superficial "liking" is not the same as deep self-relevance. Starting here protects the argument from becoming dogma.

The second, Lee and colleagues (2023), worked with painting. They compared three encoding conditions—beauty judgment, personal memory, and a symmetry control—and measured subsequent recognition. The result was partial and revealing: the beauty judgment did not generally match the memory advantage of the self-referential condition, but paintings with extreme beauty judgments were remembered as well as those encoded in relation to the self. The convergence between beauty and self-reference appears, but primarily when the aesthetic reaction is intense. Not all beauty touches the self; the beauty that strikes us most deeply, does.

The third is the strongest in favour of the thesis. Vessel and colleagues (2023) measured whether self-relevance predicts aesthetic appeal, using both real works and synthetic works personalised via style transfer based on each participant's biographical questionnaire. The result: self-relevance strongly predicted appeal, explaining more variance than eighteen combined image features—28% versus 8%—and the effect was not mediated by familiarity. That is to say: it is not that we like what we recognise; it is that we are drawn to what concerns us. The stimulus control in this work is excellent, and it is the piece that best sustains that self-relevance is not an epiphenomenon of other variables.

The fourth, Salgues and colleagues (2024), articulated the sharpest formulation. Working with a hundred representational paintings and separating the conditions of beauty, personal memory, and emotion into two studies, they found that aesthetic judgment produces a memory advantage, albeit smaller than that of self-reference or emotion, and that emotional intensity predicts recognition as well as beauty and self-relevance judgments. Their explicit conclusion: the appraisal of self-relevance could be a basic mechanism of aesthetic judgment. Not identical to emotion, not identical to beauty, but the functional common denominator of both.

To this is added a recent finding that reinforces the conclusion. Smith, De Brigard, and Marsh (2025) showed that spontaneous autobiographical recollection—not induced, but emerging on its own during contemplation—increases the degree to which a work moves us. Personal meaning does not need to be prompted: when it emerges of its own accord before the work, it amplifies the aesthetic experience.

Read together, the five works draw a clear and prudent figure. Self-relevance does not explain every aesthetic judgement—the null result of Kasdan and Belfi precludes this. But it explains, better than any alternative, the intense, memorable, and transformative forms of judgement: those in which a work ceases to be merely pleasing and begins to matter to us.

3. Why self-relevance is distinctive

There are other explanations for aesthetic value, and it is advisable to confront them to see what self-relevance possesses that they do not.

Novelty mobilises attention and curiosity, but it does not explain the idiosyncrasy of taste: why the same new work moves one person and leaves another cold. Processing fluency—the ease with which we perceive something—predicts part of the pleasure, but Vessel's data are uncomfortable for reducing beauty to fluency: the mediation by familiarity was small and left a large direct effect of self-relevance intact. Expertise modulates evaluation, but the studies most favourable to self-relevance were conducted with non-expert participants: the mechanism operates even without specialised interpretive capital.

Self-relevance is distinctive for three reasons. It connects perception, memory, emotion, and self-awareness in a single mechanism, which the other hypotheses treat separately. It explains the idiosyncrasy of taste: why intense aesthetic value is so personal. And it generates stronger and more testable predictions: if a work becomes more relevant to the self, it should be more pleasing, better remembered, and elicit more emotion, which is precisely what the evidence finds. The other hypotheses capture real components of the aesthetic episode; self-relevance better explains how they are integrated.

Operationalisation is advisable to avoid ambiguity. I define vital weight as the degree to which an aesthetic object enters into a relationship with the subject's system of self-reference and acquires value for their life, rather than merely for their perception. This is observable through measurable variables: declared self-relevance, autobiographical evocation, congruence with identity, personally attributed affective intensity, and memory advantage compared to non-self-referential conditions. It is not an ineffable essence. It is a construct with indicators.

4. The machine frontier

I arrive at the point that connects this line of thought to your fundamental question. If vital weight rests upon self-relevance, and self-relevance is the relationship of a work to the observer's self, then a system that lacks a self lacks that in relation to which something could be self-relevant.

This is not a statement regarding what machines cannot do today due to a lack of power. It is a structural statement. A system can model with increasing precision which works humans tend to like, which traits correlate with high ratings, and which images generate the most interaction. It may even predict, sometimes better than the subject themselves, what they will like. But predicting what someone will like is not the same as caring oneself. Self-relevance is not a property of the work that the system can detect; it is a relationship between the work and a biography, an identity, a vulnerability. Without the second term of that relationship, the operation has nowhere to anchor itself.

Here, it is advisable to be precise and avoid falling into the trap I criticised in previous texts. I am not asserting that machines lack an inner experience—that is an open question that serious research treats with caution and which I do not need to resolve. I am asserting something more modest and more firm: that the concrete mechanism which evidence points to as the core of intense aesthetic judgement, self-relevance, requires a self with autobiographical memory and identity, and that current systems operate through proxies of that mechanism—frequencies, correlations, aggregated preferences—which approximate the result without reproducing the relationship.

It is the same structure I described in the case of the agent that organised a birthday party and relegated the most important person in the user's life. The system could retrieve traces; it could not prioritise existences. Applied to art: a system can retrieve which works resemble those you liked; it cannot know which one will shatter you because it touches something that only you know you carry within. Self-relevance is that knowledge, and it is not transferable.

5. What this does not authorise us to conclude

Three closing remarks, for the sake of rigour.

This does not authorise the conclusion that art made by machines lacks aesthetic value. Aesthetic value, according to the argument itself, does not lie in the object or in the one who produces it, but in the relationship with the one who receives it. A work generated by a system can deeply touch a human: the vital weight is provided by the observer, not the producer. What the system cannot do is experience that weight, not prevent it for another.

This does not authorise the conclusion that self-relevance is already fully demonstrated as a nuclear mechanism. The evidence favours it as an explanation for intense forms of aesthetic judgement; it leaves open whether it explains all of them. The direct corpus is small, samples tend to be of young students, and the fine relationship between emotion and self-relevance remains unresolved. I say this because the rigour of this line of thought depends on not overstating the case.

This does not authorise the conclusion that the boundary is eternal. I assert that current systems lack a self in the relevant sense. I do not assert that it is impossible to build future systems with persistent autobiographical memory, identity, and something analogous to vulnerability. If such a thing were to arrive—and nothing indicates it is near—the nature of the question would change. Today the boundary is real; I do not declare it impassable, I describe where it lies.

6. Conclusion

Three conclusions.

The first, empirical. Recent evidence points to self-relevance as the best candidate to explain the core of aesthetic judgement: not form, not fluency, not novelty, but the degree to which a work enters into a relationship with the observer's memory and identity. The evidence is solid for intense forms of aesthetic judgement and still open for the rest.

The second, conceptual. Vital weight—the third stratum of relevance I have been defending in this line of thought—can be operationalised through self-relevance, with measurable indicators, without resorting to ineffable essences. It is what turns "I like this" into "this concerns me".

The third, regarding the machine boundary. Self-relevance requires a self in relation to which something is relevant. Current systems lack this and operate through proxies that approximate the result without reproducing the relationship. They can predict what we will like; they cannot experience that something matters to them. The difference is not one of degree of sophistication: it is one of the nature of the operation.

The self-reference effect fundamentally denotes a simple asymmetry. A work of art matters to us when it touches us; it touches us when it enters into a relationship with who we are; and who we are is a narrative, not a collection of data. The machine can read the data. For the moment, we provide the narrative. That is the distance between predicting what we will like and sharing why it matters to us.

On open conversation

This text is the third in the series on relevance regimes that I have been developing in NeuroArt: Cognitive Surplus. It develops the third stratum—vital weight—which the two previous texts identified but did not substantiate. The next planned step addresses generative art as a territory where human and machine share a process, even if they do not share meaning.

Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspectives of neuroaesthetics, the psychology of memory, the philosophy of mind, or artistic practice, this notebook remains open.

Sources

Kasdan, A., & Belfi, A. M. (2020). Investigating a self-reference effect in musical aesthetics. Experimental Results, 1, e6. https://doi.org/10.1017/exp.2020.6

Lee, J., et al. (2023). The beauty and the self: A common mnemonic advantage between aesthetic judgment and self-reference. Cognitive Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000345

Vessel, E. A., et al. (2023). Self-relevance predicts the aesthetic appeal of real and synthetic artworks generated via neural style transfer. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231188107

Salgues, S., Jacquot, A., Makowski, D., Tahar, C., Baekeland, J., Arcangeli, M., Dokic, J., Piolino, P., & Sperduti, M. (2024). Self-reference and emotional reaction drive aesthetic judgment. Scientific Reports, 14, 19699. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-68331-9

Smith, A. P., De Brigard, F., & Marsh, E. J. (2025). Aesthetic experience is supported by spontaneous autobiographical memory recollection. Memory & Cognition, 54, 1037–1051. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-025-01795-w

Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2013). Art reaches in: The default mode network and intense aesthetic experience. (Activation of the default mode network in response to intensely moving works.)

Arcangeli, M., Dokic, J., & Sperduti, M. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Self. (Philosophical framework of the SublimAE project on the involvement of the self in aesthetic experience.)

Leder, H., & Nadal, M. (2014). Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. British Journal of Psychology. (Model of aesthetic appreciation as a multi-stage episode.)

Esteban Ruiz, J. A. What matters and what is relevant. Public notebook at juanesteban.art, 2026.

Esteban Ruiz, J. A. Where the machine looks. Public notebook at juanesteban.art, 2026.

Esteban Ruiz, J. A. Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship (V2.3). PhilArchive and Zenodo, 2026.