Beauty and Change 2025

The BraIn Plasticity and Behavior Changes (BIP) research group at the Department of Psychology, University of Turin and the Giorgio Amendola Foundation are delighted to announce the Fourth International Conference on Beauty and Change, a three-day international and interdisciplinary conference that will be held in Turin, Italy on 16-18 October 2025.

The Theme
The intrinsic human tendency to seek knowledge and explore new information has attracted growing interest across the sciences and humanities in recent years. A broadening range of philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific theories are being developed to explain the origins of this “drive for knowledge” and capture its effects on crucial psychological phenomena such as learning, memory, attention, and motivation. At the same time, an expanding body of research is examining the “epistemic emotions” that accompany our behaviour as information-seekers (curiosity, interest, insight, wonder, surprise, confusion, boredom, etc.), shedding light on their phenomenology, their role in motivating behaviour, and their neural underpinnings. Together, these efforts are painting an increasingly rich picture of our lives as epistemic agents.

In parallel, a growing body of scholarship in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience is pointing to the idea that there might be a fundamental connection between aesthetic experiences and the drive to explore the environment and seek new information. According to many recent theories, in fact, aesthetic experiences are pleasurable precisely because they tap into and satisfy our needs as creatures animated by a drive for knowledge, and the arts are particularly effective means to meet that need. This perspective is opening new avenues of inquiry across disciplines. Philosophers are re-examining historical and contemporary debates on the relationship between the aesthetic and the epistemic, and on what art contributes to knowledge and understanding. Psychologists are refining models of how art and aesthetic experiences interact with and mobilize epistemic emotions and information-seeking behaviour. Neuroscientists, in turn, are uncovering how information-seeking activates reward circuitry in the brain, raising new questions about the nature of aesthetic pleasure and its relationship to other kinds of pleasure. These research efforts hold rich potential for advancing our understanding of both aesthetic experiences and epistemic practices.

The Fourth International Conference on Beauty and Change aims to explore these new lines of research systematically and in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way. It will gather philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and artists interested in both theoretical and empirical research to get a clearer picture of the many connections between our aesthetic experiences and our behaviour as epistemic agents. 

More info & call for abstracts