CogSci 2025 · Visual and musical aesthetic preferences across cultures

Harin Lee, Eline Van Geert, Elif Çelen, Raja Marjieh, Pol van Rijn, Minsu Park, & Nori Jacoby
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Sciences Society 2025 · August 2, 2025 · San Francisco, United States of America

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.