The Development of Shared Liking of Representational but not Abstract Art in Primary School Children and Their Justifications for Liking

The influence of sensorimotor experience on beauty evaluation of preschool children

Nowadays there is a broad consensus on the role of multimodality in the construction of an embodied aesthetic experience in adults, whereas little is known about the relationship between sensorimotor and aesthetic experience during development. To fill this gap, the present study investigated whether sensorimotor experience with sculpting natural materials (i.e., clay or sand) influences beauty judgments offered to abstract artifacts made by the same materials. Five years old children (n.47) were asked to rate tactile (How smooth is it?), visual (How dark is it?) and beauty (How much do you like it?) proprieties of two artifacts using a visual-analog measurement-tool ad hoc developed to fit children's cognitive skills. Participants rated the artifacts before and after a free-hands manipulation with only one of the two sculpting materials, either sand or clay. Results showed that the greater the sensorimotor interaction experienced with the artifacts, the higher the increment of beauty rating offered to the artifacts made by the same material previously manipulated. No modulations were found for tactile and visual ratings. These results demonstrate that, even in pre-school children, aesthetic experience is specifically linked to its sensorimotor component, supporting, from a developmental perspective, the definition of aesthetic experience as intrinsically rooted on beholders' bodily experience.

Shape familiarity modulates preference for curvature in drawings of common-use objects

Drawing is a way to represent common-use objects. The contour of an object is a salient feature that defines its identity. Preference for a contour (curved or angular) may depend on how familiar the resulting shape looks for that given object. In this research, we examined the influence of shape familiarity on preference for curved or sharp-angled drawings of common-use objects. We also examined the possibility that some individual differences modulated this preference. Preference for curvature was assessed with a liking rating task (Experiment 1) and with a two-alternative forced-choice task simulating approach/avoidance responses (Experiment 2). Shape familiarity was assessed with a familiarity selection task where participants selected the most familiar shape between the curved and the angular version for each object, or whether both shapes were equally familiar for the object. We found a consistent preference for curvature in both experiments. This preference increased when the objects with a curved shape were selected as the most familiar ones. We also found preference for curvature when participants selected the shape of objects as equally familiar. However, there was no preference for curvature or preference for angularity when participants selected the sharp-angled shapes as the most familiar ones. In Experiment 2, holistic and affective types of intuition predicted higher preference for curvature. Conversely, participants with higher scores in the unconventionality facet showed less preference for the curved drawings. We conclude that shape familiarity and individual characteristics modulate preference for curvature.

Concreteness of semantic interpretations of abstract and representational artworks

The authors tested two contrasting theoretical predictions to establish whether semantic interpretations of abstract artworks had different lexical concreteness from those of representational artworks. In Experiment 1, 49 non-expert participants provided brief verbal interpretations of 20 abstract and 20 representational artworks. Frequentist and Bayesian Linear Mixed Models showed that the words' concreteness levels were robustly higher for interpretations of abstract artworks than representational artworks. This difference was present regardless of the inclusion or exclusion of function words. Potential diluting or inflating impacts on the effect due to the multi-word responses were examined in Experiment 2, in which 72 new participants provided single-word interpretations for the same artworks. The effect replicated with a larger effect size. The findings suggest that non-expert viewers prioritise establishing what is depicted over seeking deeper meanings if the depicted is not readily established perceptually. The findings are incompatible with the theoretical stance that abstract art has abstract meaning. Instead, the findings are consistent with complex models of aesthetic processing in which meaning may emerge in stages. The effect of art type on the concreteness of meaning is an important, hitherto undiscovered basic finding in empirical aesthetics. Our novel methods enable further research in this field.

The Automatic Evaluation of Regularity and Semantic Decodability in Wallpaper Decorative Patterns

The perception and evaluation of decorative patterns can have a high impact in daily life but has received little empirical attention. This article attempts to offer some insight in terms of the regularity and semantic decodability. The implicit attitudes of subjects were measured by the Implicit Association Test. The results showed that regularity and semantic information can be automatically evaluated. The regular and realistic wallpaper decorative patterns are implicitly preferred to random and abstract ones. The Implicit Association Test effect of the former was greater than the latter. The increase in the number of motifs led to a decrease in the response latencies of regular and realistic patterns. The findings indicated that the processing fluency of wallpaper patterns is enhanced by a translational symmetry operation and a higher conceptual fluency of motifs. The resulting processing acceleration in high-density patterns may be due to the formation of a better Gestalt when the motifs are closer to one another.

How Stable Are Human Aesthetic Preferences Across the Lifespan?

How stable are human aesthetic preferences, and how does stability change over the lifespan? Here we investigate the stability of aesthetic taste in a cross-sectional study. We employed a simple rank-order preference task using paintings and photographs of faces and landscapes. In each of the four stimulus classes, we find that aesthetic stability generally follows an inverted U-shaped function, with the greatest degree of stability appearing in early to middle adulthood. We propose that one possible interpretation of this result is that it indicates a role for cognitive control (i.e., the ability to adapt cognition to current situations) in the construction of aesthetic taste, since cognitive control performance follows a generally similar trajectory across the lifespan. However, human aesthetic stability is on the whole rather low: even the most stable age groups show ranking changes of at least 1 rank per item over a 2-week span. We discuss possible implications for these findings in terms of existing theories of visual aesthetics and in terms of methodological considerations, though we acknowledge that other interpretations of our results are possible.