1st Annual Conference on Aesthetic Development

Contribution List

8. A comprehensive analysis of children's programs and initiatives at the 100 most visited art museums

Scientific Poster

Museums have the opportunity to provide a great learning experience for children but do not always seem to use their full potential. In this study, we examine child-friendly initiatives in the 100 most visited art museums in the world. Specifically, we examined whether museums offered workshops or audio guides for children, guided tours for children or families, interactive maps or children's...

4. Aesthetic judgments and music streaming behaviour of adolescents

Scientific Poster

„Anyone who thinks that the digital leads to the standardisation of all preferences is using the internet incorrectly.” This feuilletonistic claim (von Randow, 2017, translation by the author) is a strong counterstatement contrary to current discussions on filter bubbles and the unifying power of algorithms presumably delivering more of the same, known, and already preferred. The above claim...

23. Aesthetic transformation processes using paintings as composition templates

Scientific Poster

Paintings serve as stimuli and reference points for composing music in one-on-one instrumental lessons with children aged 8 and above, where the development of their concepts, strategies and decision-making process is closely examined to understand aesthetic transformation processes. This study builds on prior research focused on group composition and adds depth through detailed individual...

19. Are there connections between personality, intelligence and musical communication in kindergarten children?

Scientific Poster

This study examines the relationships between personality, intelligence, and musical communication in preschool children. The development of preschool children is a multifaceted process influenced by various factors. In recent years, research has increasingly shown interest in the connections between these aspects. Studies suggest that a child's personality, particularly traits such as...

11. Art experiences and sense-making throughout developmental stages

Scientific Poster

Art plays a crucial role in fostering self-reflection and supporting children's emotional and cognitive development (Kozhemyakin, 2018). By encouraging them to perceive and (re-)imagine their surroundings, art creates opportunities for meaningful experiences (Terreni, 2010; van Kuyk, 2011). This study investigates the development of children's sense-making processes and the role of emotions...

9. Beauty is the eye of the beholder: Introducing the Visual Aesthetic Principle for multimedia instructional design and how it is moderated by learners’ creativity

Scientific Poster

Oftentimes, experimental studies manipulating colors and shapes link their materials to aesthetics. However, a gap exists in understanding what a truly aesthetic design is and how it influences learning. Moreover, the seductive detail effect states that learning-irrelevant details, such as additional aesthetic features, compromise learning. This study aimed to discover how presentation slides...

21. Communication and Creativity: Measuring Musical Expressive Abilities in Children Aged 3–6 Years

Scientific Poster

Research on the concept of childhood musicality has shown that musical communication and creativity are important indicators of musicality in children aged 3 to 6 years (Buren et al., 2021). However, established measurement tools for children under 6 years mostly assess auditory abilities only (Hallam, 2006). This study aims to develop a performance test to capture musical communication and...

26. Do Children Enjoy Fear and Sadness Evoked by Stories?

Scientific Poster

The last two decades have seen much progress in empirically unraveling the question of why people enjoy negative emotions during the reception of art, music, film, and literature. However, the question of when individuals start enjoying negative emotions has rarely been addressed. I present a first exploration of whether fear and sadness predict aesthetic liking also in children. Research has...

7. Does Anyone Still Sing Lullabies? Musical Bedtime Rituals for Infants and Children today – A Cross Cultural Survey

Scientific Poster

Lullaby-singing is seen as a key element to our musical repertoire as well as musical upbringing and socialisation of infants and children. In the German speaking regions, hundreds of lullabies have been composed and handed down from generations to generations. Lullabies have been linked to sleep inducing qualities, a dynamic that still must be decisively connected with specific musical...

18. Exploring Children’s Emotional Experience with Technology-Mediated Art at a Family Arts Festival

Scientific Poster

While a growing body of literature explores adults' aesthetic experiences, research on how young children experience art remains limited and fragmented. Given that children are in distinct stages of cognitive, social, neural, and emotional development compared to adults, it is expected that their processing and understanding of art will differ. Moreover, much of the existing research on...

16. How do we learn to understand expression in music during childhood? Investigating the contributions of socio-emotional abilities and cross-modal processing.

Scientific Poster

Research and theory on music in childhood is heavily centred around traditional music training with a focus on how children learn instruments and process pitch and rhythm. Development of the ability to understand musical expression is less commonly explored. While we know children can discriminate musical emotions, we lack a comprehensive explanation of how they can do this at early stage in...

20. Infant Visual Aesthetics: Theory and Application

Scientific Poster

How infants perceive and respond to visual aesthetic stimuli is little understood. Addressing this question is important, both to understand the developmental origins of aesthetic experience, and to identify how babies can engage with and experience the positive benefits of the Arts. Here, we present a series of studies which record infant eye-movements to colours, art, books, buildings,...

15. Investigating Cortical Contributions to Rhythmic Movement and Sound using EEG and Motion Tracking

Scientific Poster

Human rhythmic movement production in response to sound and music begins at a very young age. Yet, the underlying mechanism and how it affects rhythmic auditory processing is not fully understood. Previous studies have relied primarily on simple motor tasks, such as finger tapping, to investigate this mechanism. However, more ecologically valid whole-body movements are required for a...

22. Musical development during adolescence Perceptual skills, cognitive resources, and musical training

Scientific Poster

Longitudinal studies can provide very valuable insights into the development of musical skills and cognitive resources. Nonetheless, quantitative longitudinal studies on musical and cognitive development are very rare.
The aim of this paper is to present novel empirical evidence for the inter-relations between musical and cognitive development during adolescence.
The dataset comprises data...

17. Natural versus Artificial: Exploring Aesthetic and Visual Preferences in Infants and Adults

Scientific Poster

The development of aesthetic visual preferences, particularly infants’ early sensory biases, remains underexplored. Recent research suggests that low-level chromatic and spatial image statistics can partly predict infant gaze duration and adult aesthetic preferences, as demonstrated using Van Gogh’s landscape paintings (McAdams et al., 2023). Nature varies in image statistics, particularly...

14. Social Cognitive Development and Children’s Engagement in Dance: A Mixed Methods Study and Proposed Developmental Model

Scientific Poster

Dance is an aesthetic form that children engage in at high rates, both casually and formally. Connections between dance and social cognitive development have been purported by philosophers, artists, and teachers for millennia. However, connections between childhood dance engagement and the ability to read and understand others’ emotions, a critical social cognitive skill known as affective...

6. The developmental aesthetics of touch in haptic imagery as transformed into a drawing

Scientific Poster

This paper explores the developmental aesthetics of active touch in haptic imagery as become transformed into a drawing. Touch and haptic imagery embody both exteroceptive (object-centered) and interoceptive (body-centered) functions within a single sensory system, being an interface between the body and the outside world (Haggard, et al., 2004). Newman et al., (2004) found that although the...

13. This sounds important: an EEG investigation of consonance modulation in newborns’ perceptual learning dynamic

Scientific Poster

Recent models in Empirical Aesthetic highlight the relationship between the subjective sense of beauty and learning dynamic. In our recent study (Sarasso, 2021), we showed that participants' implicit learning processes are enhanced by sound sequences composed of subjectively more valued chords, either fifth consonant or tritone dissonant chord; according to literature, most of our participants...

27. What’s that? Development of art categories in children

Scientific Poster

Background
Categorization and conceptualization are central cognitive mechanisms, that enable children to make sense of the world, generalize experiences and communicate effectively (Concepts and Categorization: Systematic and Historical Perspectives, 2016). Aesthetic categories, such as “art”, “literature” and “music”, lack unambiguous definitions and vary greatly in their perceptive...

10. Young Audiences and classical organ music? Evaluation of the organ concert for children “Orgelbauer Fröhlich“

Scientific Poster

The catholic and protestant churches in Germany are experiencing a sharp decline in church memberships. As a result more and more people don't listen to the instrument organ or to organ music anymore. At the same time the number of organ pedagogical and organ (music) mediative programs has been increasing since a few years.
„Children and classical organ music – is that possible?“ This...

12. » ... and then it was louder and more beautiful!« Childrens‘ aesthetic judgments on (their) improvised music

Scientific Poster

Free improvised music is often regarded as overcomplex and under structured, even amongst professional musicians (Bailey, 1992). It requires approaches beyond ordinary listening experiences to capture its essence and significance (Lothwesen, in print), which are based in practical experiences and cognitive reflective skills. Even though music education successfully applies improvisation as...

24. ‘Theatre for the Future’ - Innovative theatre workshops in school and their contribution to students’ personal development in times of societal transformation

Scientific Poster

Lisa Pösse, Katrin Rakoczy, Kristina Stein-Hinrichsen

Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

Theoretical background

In the context of societal transformation through digitalization and increasing diversity, socio-emotional learning goals and personal development are becoming increasingly important. Cultural education, particularly performing arts, is a promising way to promote individual...