Aesthetic sensitivity has been defined as the ability to recognize and appreciate beauty and compositional excellence, and to judge artistic merit according to standards of aesthetic value. The Visual Aesthetic Sensitivity Test (VAST) has often been used to assess this ability, but recent research has revealed it has several psychometric problems. Such problems are not easily remedied, because they reflect flawed assumptions inherent to the concept of aesthetic sensitivity as traditionally understood, and to the VAST itself. We introduce a new conception of aesthetic sensitivity defined as the extent to which someone's aesthetic valuation is influenced by a given feature. Experiment 1 aimed to characterize aesthetic sensitivity to four prominent features in visual aesthetics: complexity, symmetry, contour, and balance. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the findings of Experiment 1 and to assess the test-retest reliability of an instrument designed to measure aesthetic sensitivity to these features using an abridged set of stimuli. Our results reveal that people differ remarkably in the extent to which visual features influence their liking, highlighting the crucial role of individual variation when modelling aesthetic preferences. We did not find clear relations between the four measures of aesthetic sensitivity and personality, intelligence, and art interest and knowledge. Finally, our measurement instrument exhibited an adequate-to-good test-retest reliability.

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Empirical aesthetics has mainly focused on general and simple relations between stimulus features and aesthetic appreciation. Consequently, to explain why people differ so much in what they like and prefer continues to be a challenge for the field. One possible reason is that people differ in their aesthetic sensitivity, that is, the extent to which they weigh certain stimulus features. Studies have shown that people vary substantially in their aesthetic sensitivities to visual balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity and that this variation explains why people like different things. Our goal here was to extend this line of research to music and examine aesthetic sensitivity to musical balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity. Forty-eight nonmusicians rated their liking for 96 4-s Western tonal musical motifs, arranged in four subsets varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. We used linear mixed-effects models to estimate individual differences in the extent to which each musical attribute determined their liking. The results showed that participants differed remarkably in the extent to which their liking was explained by musical balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity. Furthermore, a retest after 2 weeks showed that this measure of aesthetic sensitivity is reliable and suggests that aesthetic sensitivity is a stable personal trait. Finally, cluster analyses revealed that participants divided into two groups with different aesthetic sensitivity profiles, which were also largely stable over time. These results shed light on aesthetic sensitivity to musical content and are discussed in relation to comparable existing research in empirical aesthetics.

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Sensory valuation is a fundamental aspect of cognition. It involves assigning hedonic value to a stimulus based on its sensory information considering personal and contextual factors. Hedonic values (e.g., liking) can be deemed affective states that motivate behavior, but the relations between hedonic and affective judgments have yet to be established. To fill this gap, we investigated the relations between stimulus features, perceived affect, and liking across domains and with potentially relevant individual traits. Fifty-eight participants untrained in music and visual art rated their liking and perceived valence and arousal for visual designs and short melodies varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity and filled out several questionnaires. First, we examined group-level relations between perceived affect and liking across domains. Second, we inspected the relations between the individual use of musical and visual properties in judgments of liking and perceived affect-that is, between aesthetic and perceived-affect sensitivities. Third, we inquired into the influence of information-related (need for cognition, or NFC) and affect-related (need for emotion) traits on individual sensitivities. We found domain-specific effects of the stimulus features on liking, a linear association between valence and liking, the inverted-U model of arousal and liking, a binary profile of musical aesthetic sensitivities, and a modulatory effect of NFC on how people use stimulus properties in their hedonic and affective judgments. In summary, the results suggest that hedonic value is primarily computed from domain-specific sensory information partially moderated by NFC.

Aesthetic sensitivity is a core idea in empirical aesthetics, referred to the appreciation of sensory objects. Throughout the history of the discipline, it has been conceptualized in many ways. Two antagonistic notions of aesthetic sensitivity encompass most contributions in the literature: On one side, the promoters of a normative notion—comprising determinist and educative views—devised it for educational purposes. On the other, the advocates of sensitivity as responsiveness to sensory stimulation—as sensitivity is commonly understood and defined conceived it as a means to investigate sensory valuation. This chapter critically reviews each notion’s emergence and development through its leading proponents, considering their influences, context, and scientific impact.

Evaluative judgment—i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked—is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain’s sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

We present a novel set of 200 Western tonal musical stimuli (MUST) to be used in research on perception and appreciation of music. It consists of four subsets of 50 stimuli varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity. All are 4 s long and designed to be musically appealing and experimentally controlled. We assessed them behaviorally and computationally. The behavioral assessment (Study 1) aimed to determine whether musically untrained participants could identify variations in each attribute. Forty-three participants rated the stimuli in each subset on the corresponding attribute. We found that inter-rater reliability was high and that the ratings mirrored the design features well. Participants’ ratings also served to create an abridged set of 24 stimuli per subset. The computational assessment (Study 2) required the development of a specific battery of computational measures describing the structural properties of each stimulus. We distilled nonredundant composite measures for each attribute and examined whether they predicted participants’ ratings. Our results show that the composite measures indeed predicted participants’ ratings. Moreover, the composite complexity measure predicted complexity ratings at least as well as existing models of musical complexity. We conclude that the four subsets are suitable for use in studies that require presenting participants with short musical motifs varying in balance, contour, symmetry, or complexity, and that the stimuli and the computational measures are valuable resources for research in music psychology, empirical aesthetics, music information retrieval, and musicology. The MUST set and MATLAB toolbox codifying the computational measures are freely available at osf.io/bfxz7.