After the great success of the 1st conference, we are excited to invite you to the 2nd Annual Conference on Aesthetic Development on November 20, 2025, at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.
The Conference is a highly interdisciplinary and seeks to understand aesthetic development across different art forms.
Children naturally engage with the visual arts, music, dance, theater, and literature from an early age, expressing themselves through aesthetic responses, experiences, and creative productions. This raises important questions: Can we develop a unified framework for understanding aesthetic development across different art forms? Do various aesthetic domains follow similar developmental paths, or do they rely on comparable principles? How do aesthetic responses and productions connect with broader social, emotional, and cognitive development?
The conference will explore these and other questions related to aesthetic development.
As part of the conference, we are looking forward to inspiring keynotes by Julia F. Christensen (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics), Rhett Dissner (online; Lewis-Clark State College, Lewiston, US), Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen) and Daniel Müllensiefen (University Hamburg).
Researchers from all disciplines are warmly invited to participate.
We welcome submissions that address:
- Early psychological precursors of aesthetic judgments and productions.
- Developmental trajectories of aesthetic appreciation and artistic creativity.
- The role of social, emotional, and cognitive development in shaping aesthetic responses and productions.
- Differences in aesthetic experiences and productions between children and adults.
- Comparative studies on aesthetic development across different art forms.
- The potential for a unified theory of aesthetic development or related organizing principles.