Infants and Adults Prefer Van Gogh’s Vibrant Color Palettes, New Study Finds

Adults and babies alike prefer the vibrant colors of van Gogh’s paintings, a new study in the Journal of Vision found.

Infants between 18 and 40 weeks old and adults between 18 and 43 years old were given iPads with a selection of ten van Gogh landscapes among 40 images. The paintings were presented in pairs with 45 possible combinations for each participant.

Though certain biases can already begin in infancy, life experiences impact individual preferences as we age.

Infants were show the painting pairs for five seconds at a time. Those that looked at one image longer than another were determined to have a visual preference for that image. Adults received the same test and visual pairings, but were asked to select the image they found most pleasant. The team then compiled the data from 25 adults to score each artwork on its average pleasantness. This data was compared with the average looking time of 25 infants.

They found that the infants generally looked longer at the artworks that the adult participants had more highly rated for pleasantness, with van Gogh’s Green Corn Stalks achieving the highest shared preference.

The research suggests that infants look longer at colors that adults also preferred and showed an affinity for Picasso over Monet. A previous study, however, found no relationship between the length infants looked at paintings and adults’ preferences. This early research showed fewer paintings than the most recent study, but included a wider range of artists.

The team then tried to pinpoint what aspects of van Gogh’s paintings most interested both infants and adults. They determined that babies looked longer at paintings with more variation in brightness and colors, and adults tended to more highly rank those same paintings.

High-contrast paintings are likely easier for infants to see since they tend to have blurry vision.

Researchers also found differences between the two groups. Infants tended toward paintings with stretches of sky, for example, while adults preferred the unexpected. Additionally, infants looked longer at images with more curves and edges, while their counterparts didn’t give them higher ratings.

Brain studies would be needed to truly determine whether infants derived more pleasure from the paintings they gazed at for a longer period, though the results suggest a link between infantile sensory bias and adults’ aesthetic judgements.

Adults also tend to have experiential associations that can contribute to their choices.

“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,” said Philip McAdams, first author of the study from the University of Sussex.