By age 6, children typically share an equal number of resources between themselves and others. However, fairness involves not merely that each person receive an equal number of resources (“numerical equality”) but also that each person receive equal quality resources (“quality equality”). In Study 1, children (N = 87, 3–10 years) typically split four resources “two each” by age 6, but typically monopolized the better two resources until age 10. In Study 2, a new group of 6‐ to 8‐year‐olds (N = 32) allocated resources to third parties according to quality equality, indicating that children in this age group understand that fairness requires both types of equality.
expressionism is a school of art characterized by nonrepresentational paintings where color, composition, and brush strokes are used to express emotion. These works are often misunderstood by the public who see them as requiring no skill and as images that even a child could have created. However, a recent series of studies has shown that ordinary adults untrained in art or art history, as well as young children, can differentiate paintings by abstract expressionists and superficially similar works by preschool children and even animals (monkeys, apes, elephants). Adults perform this distinction with an accuracy rate of ∼64%, significantly higher than chance. Here we ask whether machine perception can do as well. Using the same paintings, we show that in ∼68% of the cases the computer algorithm can discriminate between abstract paintings and the work of children and animals. We also applied a method that computes the correlation between the degree of artisticity deduced from human perception of the paintings and the visual content of the images, and we show significant correlation between perceived artisticity and visual content. The image content descriptor that was the strongest predictor of correct identification was the fractality of the painting. We also show that the computer algorithm predicts the perceived intentionality of the paintings by humans. These results confirm perceptible differences between works by abstract expressionists and superficially similar ones by the untrained and show that people see more than they think they see when looking at abstract expressionism.
Aesthetic judgments typically involve assessments of one's own responses and thus are partly or largely subjective. Moral judgments may seem otherwise, but their susceptibility to influence by factors extrinsic to the object of judgment-notably, by irrelevant sensations of disgust-has led some to argue that moral and aesthetic judgments are functionally alike, a view consistent with philosophical arguments and neuropsychological evidence. We examined the behavioral consequences of this view by adapting Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz's (2011) procedure for studying the effect of disgust on moral judgments. In Study 1, participants drank bitter, sweet, or neutral liquids and rated liking and quality of abstract paintings. To rule out a possible asymmetry in the effect of disgust on negative rather than positive stimuli, we had participants in Study 2 drink bitter or neutral drinks and rate the ugliness and badness of aesthetic violations-Komar and Melamid's abstract paintings using undesirable art elements. Participants also rated the moral wrongness of harm and purity violations, allowing for direct comparison of moral and aesthetic judgments. To rule out concerns that participants failed to engage with abstract artworks, Study 3 used representational paintings with disturbing subject matter. Across all studies, disgust had no effect on aesthetic judgments but reliably increased the severity of moral judgments. Thus we replicate Eskine et al. (2011) while uncovering an important functional distinction between aesthetic and moral judgments, a difference that may reflect a "disinterestedness" in aesthetic evaluations not seen in moral evaluations because of the latter's comparatively practical and action-guiding consequences.
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