Infants & Adults Enjoy Van Gogh’s Paintings For The Same Reasons, Study Affirms

The alluring appeal of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings seems to transcend age. A new study by the University of Sussex published in the Journal of Vision found that infants and adults are drawn to his captivating artwork for the same reason.
 
Van Gogh’s fascinating paintings present viewers with beautiful worlds of green knolls and starry nights. You might prefer some of his pieces over others now, but it seems these inclinations could have already been present in you as a baby.
 
Babies between 18 and 40 weeks were given iPads with different van Gogh images, and the same works were shown to 25 adults between 18 and 43 years old. The images were shown in pairs.
 
In order to determine which painting the infant favored, the researchers showed them each pair for five seconds at a time. Babies that looked at one image for longer were noted to have a visual preference over the other. Adults, on the other hand, were asked to choose which they liked better between the two.
 
There was a crossover between their preferences, and the study found that infants and adults usually leaned into the same image. Also noted was that van Gogh’s Green Corn Stalks was the highest-rated piece of work.
 
Philip McAdams, the study’s first author, shared that infants looked at colors that adults liked and favored pieces of work with a range of shades and sweeping images of the sky. Images with larger variants of hues might have fared better with children due to their developing vision.
 
Although personal life experiences and years of developing preferences can shape your attraction to certain forms of art, this study reveals that sometimes these tendencies might have been ingrained in you from the beginning.
 
Whether or not babies got the same pleasure while looking at these paintings as adults did will take further brain studies. However, this research does suggest a link between sensory biases in infants and adults’ aesthetic judgment.
 
 
 
[via ARTnews and The Guardian, Photo 199967867© Gianni Tonazzini | Dreamstime.com]