Date of Thesis

Spring 2026

Description

Understanding the origins of aesthetic preferences remains an important question in psychology, particularly in domains such as music where both biological constraints and cultural learning play important roles. While adults exhibit consistent preferences for certain musical features, including aspects of vocal quality or timbre, it remains unclear whether these preferences reflect early-developing perceptual biases or emerge through experience. The present study addresses this question by adopting a developmental paradigm previously used in the visual domain to examine whether infants’ responses to music align with adult aesthetic evaluations.

Twenty three infants between 8 and 12 months of age participated in a remote preferential listening paradigm. Infants were presented with recordings of unfamiliar adults singing two familiar children’s songs, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Prior to the infant experiment, adult listeners rated a larger set of recordings on dimensions including overall enjoyment and vocal pleasantness. Based on these adult ratings, woman singers were divided into high-rated and low-rated groups according to vocal pleasantness ratings, and the four highest-rated and lowest-rated singers were selected for the infant study.

Contrary to predictions, infants did not show reliable differences in behavior between high-rated and low-rated singers across any primary measure, suggesting that early responses to vocal music do not straightforwardly align with adult judgments of vocal pleasantness. However, infants’ responses were influenced by the specific song, with significantly greater looking time and marginally greater rhythmic movement observed during “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” particularly among older infants.

Exploratory analyses revealed a negative correlation between infants’ negative affect and adult valence ratings, such that infants displayed less negative affect when clips were rated by adults as sounding more positive, indicating sensitivity to affective or expressive qualities of singing. In contrast, no significant associations were observed between infant behavior and features that were acoustically derived using MIR Toolbox, such as pitch, brightness and roughness. These findings suggest that infants may be attuned to affective dimensions of musical input even in the absence of clear preference patterns based on broader adult evaluative judgments.

Together, these findings provide a novel extension of developmental aesthetic research into the auditory domain. While prior work has demonstrated alignment between infant and adult preferences for visual stimuli, the present findings do not show comparable alignment for musical vocal timbre. Instead, the results suggest that sensitivity to affective features of music may emerge earlier in development than the ability to form evaluative judgments that mirror adult aesthetic preferences. This dissociation highlights the importance of distinguishing between early perceptual-affective responses and later-emerging aesthetic evaluations in understanding the developmental origins of musical preference.

Keywords

Infant music perception, vocal timbre, aesthetic preferences, music cognition, infant development, musical timbre

Access Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Type

Bachelor of Arts

Major

Psychology

Second Major

Economics

Minor, Emphasis, or Concentration

Philosophy

First Advisor

Dr. Haley Kragness

Second Advisor

Dr. Nicholas Roseth

Third Advisor

Professor Ellen Chamberlin

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