“looking at artifacts”: the development of visual aesthetic preferences

Abstract

Developmental aesthetics is an underexamined yet growing area of aesthetics research. Very few studies have investigated infants’ visual preferences for artifacts. Would a young child have visual preferences for artifacts, given their limited exposure to the world and with a developing brain? Revisiting our framework (Göksun et al., 2014), which was built on the aesthetic triad of Chatterjee and Vartanian (2014), we provide an overview of the current state of the field on early visual aesthetic preferences with a focus on art and architecture. After presenting evidence for perceptual primitives that may guide visual aesthetic preferences, we center on early artifact appreciation with infants and young children. We conclude the paper by charting new research directions required to examine early aesthetic appreciation.