Visual and Auditory Aesthetic Preferences Across Cultures

2025-02-20

AI Summary

Existing aesthetic research predominantly relies on Western samples, limiting understanding of how culture shapes aesthetic preferences. Method: We conducted a cross-cultural experiment across 10 countries with 4,835 participants, collecting 401,000 aesthetic judgments spanning five perceptual modalities—shape, curvature, color, harmony, and melody. Contribution/Results: This study provides the first unified, quantitative multimodal validation of the dual-origin hypothesis—integrating shared perceptual mechanisms and cultural learning. We find strong cross-cultural universality in preferences for curvature and symmetry; consistent color category preferences but divergent relational structures; high cross-cultural agreement in harmonic interval judgments yet region-specific spectral preferences; and maximal cultural variation in melodic preferences. Together, these findings establish the most comprehensive empirical, multimodal framework to date for investigating the interplay between universal constraints and cultural specificity in human aesthetic cognition.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

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. Our investigation gathers 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, relational 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.

Problem

• Examining aesthetic preferences across cultures
• Investigating universal and cultural patterns in aesthetics
• Analyzing shape, color, and music preferences globally

Innovation

• Cross-cultural aesthetic preferences study
• Systematic sampling of parameter spaces
• Analysis of universal and cultural patterns