Evaluative judgment across domains: Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs

The Role of Art Expertise and Symmetry on Facial Aesthetic Preferences

“…Thus, the differences in the visual assessment of beauty may be related to the peculiarities of each artistic category. These results are consistent with Clemente et al [82], who found stimuli modality-specific (visual/auditory) effects on evaluative judgments. Moreover, musicians often have a high affinity to symmetrical features, as these are essential to organize the tempo of a melody [5,106].…”

“…We included random intercepts and slopes within participants and intercepts within stimuli as random effects. Following Clemente et al [82], we extracted individual slope estimates from the random-effects structure of LMMs as a measure of aesthetic sensitivity-the extent to which a particular sensory feature affects someone's aesthetic valuation [92]-to facial asymmetry for each participant. In this case, negative slope values indicate lower preference for facial asymmetry, which is expected for most participants, whereas positive values indicate greater preference for facial asymmetry.…”

“…Recent research has found that the preference for symmetry in abstract images is less pronounced in visual artists than in the general population [49][50][51], but it could be asked if this pattern would also be applied for the preference for symmetry in human faces in visual artists. In addition, it is well established that cross-modal interactions between different sensory modalities can impact individual perception [80,81] and that stimuli modality-specific (visual/auditory) effects on aesthetic judgments have already been reported [82]. Then, it is reasonable to question how the expertise in non-visually dominant arts such as music and dance would have an impact on the symmetry visual perception and visual aesthetic judgments.…”

Can art promote understanding? A review of the psychology and neuroscience of aesthetic cognitivism

“…Activation in parts of the DMN (orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortex) reflect a domaingeneral pattern of neural connectivity associated with aesthetic appreciation (Belfi et al, 2019;Vessel, Isik, Belfi, Stahl, & Starr, 2019), corresponding to pleasure in different art domains such as images (Vartanian & Goel, 2004), music (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011), and architectural spaces (Vartanian et al, 2013). Despite domain-general reward processing, similar elemental features (e.g., balance, complexity, symmetry) in different art forms are not equally liked, suggesting that the sensory-motor system may differentially interact with the emotion-valuation system depending on the modality of the artwork (Clemente, Pearce, Skov, & Nadal, 2021).…”

“…Openness to experience, more than any other personality trait, is linked to aesthetic appreciation and cognition (DeYoung, 2015). People higher in openness to experience tend to know more about art (Atari, Afhami, & Mohammadi-Zarghan, 2020), make different interest-confusion appraisals (Fayn et al, 2019;Silvia, 2010), appreciate AESTHETIC COGNITIVISM REVIEW 21 compositional attributes (Clemente et al, 2021), and are more likely to have profound experiences (e.g., awe, wonder, curiosity;Fayn, MacCann, Tiliopoulos, & Silvia, 2015;Pelowski, Markey et al, 2017;Silvia, Fayn, Nusbaum, & Beaty, 2015).…”