{"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":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49384/galley/37346/download/"}]}