Abstract
Theories concerning the human aesthetic sense are rarely based on moderate views. While Immanuel Kant argued that the aesthetic judgment is strictly independent of the knowledge of things (Critique of Judgment, §15, page 1795), modern biological research suggests that the aesthetic sense emerged as a by-product of natural selection for the recognition of signals. We tested such theories by measuring the effect of cognitive training on aesthetic preference. Using a psychometric method of paired comparisons we obtained preference data by presenting to twenty-two naive observers 16 compound Gabor signals that were equally spaced on a full ‘circle of form’ in a 2-D feature space. Subjects were then trained to classify the same patterns into four deliberately defined pattern classes. The effect of this learning procedure was then assessed in another preference experiment.
We show that our preference data can be explained in terms of two factors: pattern complexity and pattern symmetry. Cognitive learning (ie biography) significantly affected the complexity factor, while the symmetry factor remained invariant. We argue that these findings are inconsistent with the extreme positions of both Kant and the biologists. Rather, they imply that aesthetic preference is being determined by the interplay of ‘pre-wired’ biological functions of signal recognition and of individual experience.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.