Whether it is rolling yellow wheat fields or a gnarled and twisted olive tree, Van Gogh’s landscapes have long entranced art lovers. Now researchers have found the paintings deemed more pleasant by adults are also more captivating for babies.
The team say their findings suggest certain biases in what we chose to look at are already present in infancy and carry over into adulthood, although life experiences also have an impact on which paintings we end up preferring when we get older.
“It seems that there could be some link between this mature adult aesthetic response and these early sensory biases to things like luminance [and colour] contrast,” said Philip McAdams, first author of the study from the University of Sussex.
Writing in the Journal of Vision, McAdams and his colleagues describe how infants aged between 18 and 40 weeks old and adults between 18 and 43 years of age were given iPads and shown a selection of 10 of Van Gogh’s landscapes among 40 possible images. The paintings were shown in pairs, resulting in 45 different combinations for each participant.
The infants were sat on a parent’s lap in a dimly lit room at home and were recorded on camera as they were shown the pairs of paintings for five seconds at at time.
“If a baby looks longer at one image versus the other, then we say they have a visual preference for that image,” said McAdams.
Adults were similarly each shown 45 pairs of images, but were asked to select the picture they found most pleasant.
The team used data from 25 adults to create an average pleasantness score for each artwork, and compared this with the average looking time from 25 infants.
The results reveal that the infants tended to gaze longer at artworks which adult participants rated higher for pleasantness. Van Gogh’s Green Corn Stalks had the highest shared preference.
McAdams said the findings were something of a surprise. Research has suggested that infants look longer at colours that adults like and show a preference for Picasso over Monet, but a previous study found no relationship between how long infants stared at paintings and adults’ preferences for the works.
McAdams said that could be because the earlier research involved fewer paintings than the current study and included a range of artists, potentially making associations more difficult to tease out.
The team also explored what it was about Van Gogh’s paintings that influenced infants and adults. They found that babies gazed longer at paintings with more variation in brightness and the range of colours used, and that adults also gave them higher ratings.
One explanation, McAdams said, could be that such high-contrast paintings are easier for infants to see, given their vision is a little blurry.
“The higher [the] contrast, the more the infant can actually see something, and the more easily their brain would be able to process that information,” he said.
There were also differences between the age groups, however, with infants gazing longer at more predictable paintings – such as those with stretches of sky – and adults preferring those with unexpected areas.
Infants also looked longer at images with many edges and curves, but adults did not give them higher ratings.
“That is not strange because a face has lots of curves on it, and babies have this very strong bias from the moment they are born to look at faces,” said McAdams.
He said that it would take brain studies to explore whether infants gained more pleasure from the paintings they looked at for longer, but that the results suggest there is a link between the sensory biases of babies and adults’ aesthetic judgments.
He also noted, however, that adults also had other influences on their taste, for example whether a landscape reminded them of a certain location.
“Those ‘top-down’ factors can affect the aesthetic experience, whereas for babies, with less experience in the world… they’re responding more in a ‘bottom-up’ manner to these visual features,” he said.
Prof Denis Mareschal, the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, University of London, who was not involved in the work, said babies were endowed from the earliest age with perceptual biases that help them explore the world.
“In a nice nod to Goldilocks, infants prefer to explore stimuli that are neither too simple nor too complex to decipher, spending the longest time exploring stimuli that are ‘just right’,” he said.
But what counted as “just right” was not hardwired, he said. It changes with age and infant experience.
“This article nicely demonstrates the continuities that can exist between what our infant selves would choose to look at and what our adults choose to look at,” he said.
