Symmetry is a basic geometry property that affects people’s aesthetic experience in common ways across cultures and historical periods, but the origins of the universal preference for symmetrical patterns is not clear. We assessed four-year-old children’s and adults’ reported aesthetic preferences between symmetrical and asymmetrical visual patterns, as well as their spontaneous attentional preferences between the patterns. We found a striking dissociation between these two measures in the children: Children looked longer at the symmetrical patterns, relative to otherwise similar but asymmetrical patterns, but they showed no explicit preference for those patterns. These findings suggest that the human’s aesthetic preferences have high postnatal plasticity, calling into question theories that symmetry is a “core feature” mediating people’s aesthetic experience throughout life. The findings also call into question the assumption, common to many studies of human infants, that attentional choices reflect subjective preferences or values.

IntroductionNavigation is a fundamental and multidimensional cognitive function that individuals rely on to move around the environment. In this study, we investigated the neural basis of human spatial navigation ability.MethodsA large cohort of participants (N > 200) was examined on their navigation ability behaviorally and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were then used to explore the corresponding neural basis of spatial navigation.ResultsThe gray matter volume (GMV) of the bilateral parahippocampus (PHG), retrosplenial complex (RSC), entorhinal cortex (EC), hippocampus (HPC), and thalamus (THAL) was correlated with the participants’ self‐reported navigational ability in general, and their sense of direction in particular. Further fMRI studies showed that the PHG, RSC, and EC selectively responded to visually presented scenes, whereas the HPC and THAL showed no selectivity, suggesting a functional division of labor among these regions in spatial navigation. The resting‐state functional connectivity analysis further revealed a hierarchical neural network for navigation constituted by these regions, which can be further categorized into three relatively independent components (i.e., scene recognition component, cognitive map component, and the component of heading direction for locomotion, respectively).ConclusionsOur study combined multi‐modality imaging data to illustrate that multiple brain regions may work collaboratively to extract, integrate, store, and orientate spatial information to guide navigation behaviors.

This study aims to compare the effects of oral, paper and augmented reality (AR) instructions during assembly tasks. 44 assembly operators, the majority of which have cognitive or motor disabilities, participate in a within-subjects experiment in which they perform three different assembly tasks. In doing so, the different instructional media are alternated. The outcome variables under study are productivity, quality, stress, help-seeking behaviour, perceived complexity, physical effort and competence frustration. In addition, this study examines the effects of characteristics of operators by taking into account their cognitive skills and experience with each task type as predictor variables. Finally, as operators perform one of the assembly tasks four times, learning curves are studied as well. Results of a multilevel analysis show that operators using AR instructions outperform their colleagues using more traditional instructional media with regard to quality. In addition, AR instructions give rise to less help-seeking behavior as compared to oral instructions. Finally, there is some evidence for AR instructions to yield a lower perceived complexity than oral instructions. Furthermore, the results indicate that the operators' cognition and experience play a significant role in terms of many outcome variables. Learning curves reveal that operators using AR instructions experience less stress from the first assembly attempt onwards, whereas for operators using oral or paper instructions, it takes several attempts before being equally relaxed.

During the past two decades, cognitive neuroscientists have sought to elucidate the common neural basis of the experience of beauty. Still, empirical evidence for such common neural basis of different forms of beauty is not conclusive. To address this question, we performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on the existing neuroimaging studies of beauty appreciation of faces and visual art by nonexpert adults (49 studies, 982 participants, meta-data are available at https://osf.io/ s9xds/). We observed that perceiving these two forms of beauty activated distinct brain regions: While the beauty of faces convergently activated the left ventral striatum, the beauty of visual art convergently activated the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). However, a conjunction analysis failed to reveal any common brain regions for the beauty of visual art and faces. The implications of these results are discussed.