The baby as beholder: Adults and infants have common preferences for original art.

Abstract

The field of experimental aesthetics and neuroaesthetics has explored the contributions of both objective and subjective factors in the appreciation for art. This cross-sectional study attempted to distinguish these factors by comparing adult and infant preferences for nonrepresentational artistic masterworks in their original and altered forms. Using a forced-choice paradigm for adults, and a preferential-looking paradigm for 6- to 10-month-old infants, we found that both populations preferred the original art, especially when complexity and contrast were reduced in the altered versions. Neither of the populations preferred the original art when the pattern was disrupted. Infants, but not the adults, preferred the originals that retained compositional balance, and adults, but not infants, preferred the artworks with intact focal points. In sum, our results demonstrate that appreciation for the objective features of artworks, especially complexity and contrast, are biologically driven, likely through experience-expectant brain growth, and remain stable throughout life.

Moderate Contrast in the Evaluation of Paintings Is Liked More but Remembered Less than High Contrast

“…Formal characteristics and manipulations of art seem to have an impact that goes beyond perceptual processing and basic observation. This has not only been demonstrated with regard to art (Krentz and Earl, 2013; Van Dongen and Zijlmans, 2017) but with regard to reading comprehension as well (Hoeben Mannaert et al, 2017). Generally, manipulations to formal characteristics of modality-specific stimuli appear to have a major effect on either their processing, appreciation, memory or a combination of these elements.…”

Beauty and Beholders: Are Past Intuitions Correct?

“…Using a population of both adults and 6-10-month-old human infants, Krentz and Kincade (2012) further found that both young and old preferred the same highly complex and highly contrastive original art over more simplistic alterations, a preference suggesting that an interest in complexity and contrast begins very early in life, even before a significant impact of culture, experience in the world, and higher level cognitive reasoning. Interestingly, only the infants -not adults -in this study preferred the originally highly symmetrical artworks over alterations that reduced the symmetry, confirming past studies that have shown a strong preference for symmetrical patterns in young infants (Fantz 1958).…”

“…For example, Japanese participants are more likely to notice the contextual characteristics of visual scenes, whereas American participants notice salient foreground objects, or focal points (Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, and Larsen 2003;Masuda and Nisbett 2001;Miyamoto, Nisbett, and Masuda 2006). Further, Krentz and Kincade (2012) found that adults (all from an American college), but not infants (relatively naïve to cultural influence), preferred original art with intact focal points over versions where the focal point has been attenuated or removed. Thus, although Alexander lists a "strong center" as one of his universals, this factor may in fact reflect his own cultural bias, and be better suited for an example of the variable 10 percent.…”

“…18 However, using the second "top-down" approach to exploring human appreciation for beauty, other researchers have found that adults tend to prefer non-symmetrical abstract art in its original form over alterations that increase its symmetry (Krupinski and Locher 1988). Similarly, Krentz and Kincade (2012) found that adults show no increased preference for highly balanced original abstract art over subtly altered versions that had less symmetry. Nevertheless, when abstract art is highly altered to disrupt inherent balance, participants do seem to show a preference for the original art (Locher and Nagy 1996;Locher, 2003).…”

Children’s images of beauty: environmental influences on aesthetic preferences

“…Authors of recent studies in psychology have adopted alternative approaches to exploring aesthetic preferences. Some use 'preferential looking' tasks to measure babies' responses to images and objects (Krentz and Earl 2013); some explore gender variations in colour preferences (LoBue and DeLoache 2011) while others investigate the stability of aesthetic preferences over time (Pugach, Leder and Graham 2017). (For a recent overview of literature in the field, see Palmer, Schloss, and Sammartini 2013).…”