ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2017
How Stable Are Human Aesthetic Preferences Across the Lifespan?
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Preserved Aesthetic Judgements in Parkinson's Disease: A Case-Control Study Suggests Limited Need for Content Adaptation for Receptive Arts Engagement.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- Conserving the beauty of the world's reef fish assemblages.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Using machine learning to predict judgments on Western visual art along content-representational and formal-perceptual attributes.PloS one · 2024Article
- Assessing the aesthetic attractivity of European butterflies: A web-based survey protocol.PloS one · 2023Article
- The aesthetic value of reef fishes is globally mismatched to their conservation priorities.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Validation of an Aesthetic Assessment System for Commercial Tasks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Aesthetic Preference for Negatively-Valenced Artworks Remains Stable in Pathological Aging: A Comparison Between Cognitively Impaired Patients With Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Controls.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Hedonic Preferences to Audio and Visual Stimulation in Seniors with Cognitive Impairments.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2021Article
- Listening to birdsong reveals basic features of rate perception and aesthetic judgements.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- A Theoretical Framework for How We Learn Aesthetic Values.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2020Article
- The Aesthetic Self. The Importance of Aesthetic Taste in Music and Art for Our Perceived Identity.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Continuous ratings of movie watching reveal idiosyncratic dynamics of aesthetic enjoyment.PloS one · 2019Article
- Decomposing Complexity Preferences for Music.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How stable are human aesthetic preferences, and how does stability change over the lifespan? Here we investigate the stability of aesthetic taste in a cross-sectional study. We employed a simple rank-order preference task using paintings and photographs of faces and landscapes. In each of the four stimulus classes, we find that aesthetic stability generally follows an inverted U-shaped function, with the greatest degree of stability appearing in early to middle adulthood. We propose that one possible interpretation of this result is that it indicates a role for cognitive control (i.e., the ability to adapt cognition to current situations) in the construction of aesthetic taste, since cognitive control performance follows a generally similar trajectory across the lifespan. However, human aesthetic stability is on the whole rather low: even the most stable age groups show ranking changes of at least 1 rank per item over a 2-week span. We discuss possible implications for these findings in terms of existing theories of visual aesthetics and in terms of methodological considerations, though we acknowledge that other interpretations of our results are possible.
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