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{
    "pk": 49384,
    "title": "Visual and Musical Aesthetic Preferences Across Cultures",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Research on how humans perceive aesthetics in shapes, colours, and music has predominantly focused on Western populations, limiting our understanding of how cultural environments shape aesthetic preferences. We present a large-scale cross-cultural study examining aesthetic preferences across five distinct modalities extensively explored in the literature: shape, curvature, colour, musical harmony and melody. We gather 401,403 preference judgements from 4,835 participants across 10 countries, systematically sampling two-dimensional parameter spaces for each modality. The findings reveal both universal patterns and cultural variations. Preferences for shape and curvature cross-culturally demonstrate a consistent preference for symmetrical forms. While colour preferences are categorically consistent, ratio-like preferences vary across cultures. Musical harmony shows strong agreement in interval relationships despite differing regions of preference within the broad frequency spectrum, while melody shows the highest cross-cultural variation. These results suggest that aesthetic preferences emerge from an interplay between shared perceptual mechanisms and cultural learning.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Psychology; Aesthetics; Art and Cognition; Culture; Music; Vision; Big data; Cross-cultural analysis"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Poster Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/60h1x9rm",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Harin",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Lee",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Eline",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Van Geert",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "KU Leuven",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Elif",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "‚elen",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Raja",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Marjieh",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Princeton University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Pol",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "van Rijn",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Minsu",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Park",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "New York University Abu Dhabi",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Nori",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Jacoby",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Cornell University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T19:00:00+01:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49384/galley/37346/download/"
        }
    ]
}