RT Journal Article
T1 Preference for curved contours across cultures
A1 Gómez-Puerto, Gerardo
A1 Rosselló, Jaume
A1 Corradi, Guido
A1 Acedo-Carmona, Cristina
A1 Munar, Enric
A1 Nadal, Marcos
K1 Estética
AB We postulate that humans’ preference for curvature is an expression of a natural propensity for aesthetics, understood as a set of perceptual, cognitive, and affective abilities and biases that orient humans toward the sort of sensory features that are used to convey culturally relevant meanings. Here we investigate whether preference for curved contours, observed previously in Western large-scale societies, is also present in 2 small-scale societies relatively uninfluenced by Western culture. We asked participants from Oaxaca (Mexico) and Bawku (Ghana), and also from Mallorca (Spain), to perform a 2-alternative, forced-choice task consisting in choosing between photographs of curved and sharp-angled versions of the same real objects presented for 80 milliseconds. The task required minimal instructions, aiming to avoid confounds arising from translations. Our results show that participants in each of the 3 countries chose the curved-contour alternative significantly more often than the sharp-angled one (Spain: .59; Mexico: .55; Ghana: .58) and that these proportions did not differ significantly. We conclude that preference for curved-contour objects is common across cultures and conjecture that it is a constituent of a natural propensity for aesthetics.
PB American Psychological Association
YR 2017
FD 2017
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/33237
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/33237
LA eng
NO Gómez-Puerto, G., Rosselló, J., Corradi, G., Acedo-Carmona, C., Munar, E., & Nadal, M. (2018). Preference for curved contours across cultures. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(4), 432–439. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000135
NO Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia: Beca FPU AP2009-3369 Ministerio de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología: Proyectos FFI2010-20759 y FFI2013-44007-P.Universidad de las Islas Baleares
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 22 ene 2026