Cultural conditioning of aesthetic perception Taste is largely relative and plastic. 1. Aesthetic canons differ across societies and eras.…

Cultural conditioning of aesthetic perception Taste is largely relative and plastic. 1. Aesthetic canons differ across societies and eras. What is considered beautiful - whether body type, painting style, or musical harmony - changes noticeably over time. For example, ideals of the human body: in the Renaissance, full forms were valued, while today a sporty slim body is in fashion; in some cultures scars or tattoos are recognized as decoration, in others they are not. Musical aesthetics is largely learned: we get used to considering those combinations of sounds beautiful that we often hear in our native culture 2. Psychological effects of learning. Cognitive psychology describes mechanisms that explain how the attractiveness of a stimulus increases with familiarity. One of the most reliably reproduced phenomena is the mere exposure effect: an object seen or heard many times starts to be liked more simply because of the fact of recognition. 3. The byproduct hypothesis. The well-known cognitive scientist Steven Pinker figuratively called music "auditory cheesecake": just as a fatty sweet cake deceives our innate craving for calories, music and art deceive existing neural systems, bringing pleasure while having no independent evolutionary function. We love beauty not because nature specifically "programmed" us for art, but because art managed to press the buttons of our neurobiology, which evolved for other purposes 4. Adaptiveness vs. redundancy. Some suggest that art and aesthetics are a byproduct of high intelligence and imagination, which evolved for solving practical tasks, such as planning, empathy, communication. On the other hand, there is a counterargument: since art exists in all known cultures and people spend so many resources on it, it could not fail to influence survival. Perhaps aesthetics played a role in bonding communities, transmitting knowledge, or sexual selection - Visual and Auditory Aesthetic Preferences Across Cultures - Social and Affective Neuroscience of Everyday Human Interaction - Is Music Really Auditory Cheesecake? Developed the photos. Sometimes something already works