Brain electrical responses to high- and low-ranking buildings.

Since the ancient world, architecture generally distinguishes two categories of buildings with either high- or low-ranking design. High-ranking buildings are supposed to be more prominent and, therefore, more memorable. Here, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to drawings of buildings with either high- or low-ranking architectural ornaments and found that ERP responses between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus presentation recorded over both frontal lobes were significantly more positive in amplitude to high-ranking buildings.