General Information
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.
Established in 2022, the International Conference on Beauty and Change is a highly successful interdisciplinary forum for discussing recent advancements in philosophical and empirical aesthetics. This year’s conference will be devoted to the theme “Aesthetic Experience and the Drive for Knowledge” and will gather artists and leading scholars from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to reflect on how our engagement with the arts and our aesthetic experiences influence, interact with, or emerge from our drive to explore and understand the world.
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.
Invited Speakers
Jérôme Dokic (Institut Jean Nicod)
Jan R. Landwehr (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Winfried Menninghaus (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main)
Diana Omigie (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Francesco Poli (University of Cambridge)
Elisabeth Schellekens (Uppsala University)
Martin Skov (Copenhagen Business School; Copenhagen University Hospital, Hvidovre)
The Venue
The conference will be held at the Giorgio Amendola Foundation, Via Tollegno, 52, 10154 – Torino, Italy.
Conference Costs
Conference fee for students (BA and MA): free
Conference fee for untenured researchers (PhD students and postdocs): €100
Conference fee for tenured researchers: €200
Conference dinner (optional): €45
Student Prizes
Two small monetary prizes of €100 will be offered for the two best contributions by students (BA, MA, PhD). One of the two prizes will be awarded for a talk, the other for a poster. The prizes will be assigned by the conference scientific committee based on the quality and relevance of the submitted abstract. The two winners will be announced during the conference. If you would like to be considered for one of these prizes, please indicate so in the body of your submission email.
Satellite Workshop
This year, the conference will be preceded by a one-day satellite workshop on “The Repeated Experience of Beauty”. The workshop aims to explore the phenomenon of repeated aesthetic experiences, focusing on the paradoxical interplay between novelty and familiarity in aesthetic appreciation. It will feature talks by Winfried Menninghaus and Jan R. Landwehr among others. The workshop will take place on 15 October 2025 and will be open to all registered conference participants at no additional cost. More information will be made available here in due course.
Scientific Committee
Carola Barbero (University of Turin)
Alessandro Bertinetto (University of Turin)
Elvira Brattico (Aarhus University & University of Bari Aldo Moro)
Fabrizio Calzavarini (University of Turin)
Maura Crepaldi (University of Bergamo)
Alice Cancer (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan)
Filippo Contesi (University of Cagliari)
Jacopo Frascaroli (University of Turin)
Irene Ronga (University of Turin)
Maria Luisa Rusconi (University of Bergamo)
Pietro Sarasso (University of Turin)
Sander Van de Cruys (University of Antwerp)
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