News release

From: The Royal Society

Beauty is (not) in the eye of the beholder - Babies as young as four months old may have a sense of beauty, research suggests. In adults, sensing beauty is defined as as a "liking without wanting" mental state, leading to prolonged visual attention. The authors compared the eye movements of infants and adults while showing them moving patterns of dots. Adults consistently judged some patterns as more beautiful than others, and both infants and adults looked at the "beautiful" patterns longer, giving new insight as to when human sense of beauty develops. Proceedings of the Royal Society B [Video available]

Do infants have a sense of beauty? A study using kinetic dot displays
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Adults sense beauty by judging and looking more at some visual patterns over others. When does sensing beauty emerge developmentally? Infants between 4 and 24 months as well as adults were shown pairs of dynamic patterns of dots in 5-second presentations. Adults consistently judged some patterns as more beautiful than others, and both infants and adults looked briefly to the less beautiful at first and subsequently displayed a longer duration looking response to the more beautiful patterns. The results suggest that at least some aspects of experiencing beauty are rooted in perceptual pattern processing abilities present even in young infants.