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Abstract

It is typically assumed in the empirical aesthetics literature that generalizable abstract stimulus attributes like familiarity, fluency, and complexity drive preferences. This general nature means that they can, at least in principle, apply to any stimulus regardless of its characteristics and sensory modality. However, most studies in this tradition are restricted to group-level trends and particular stimulus properties. Therefore, they say nothing about amodal or general preferences for particular levels of such abstract attributes independently from their characterization at the individual level. Moreover, the hypothesis of a general, amodal preference for attributes like complexity was not empirically supported and only scarcely tested until we provided empirical evidence against it in our Clemente et al. (2021) study. In their quest for empirical evidence in favor of a preference for complexity across the auditory and visual modalities, Friedman et al. (2024) made two central claims: First, they found it surprising that aesthetic sensitivity for visual and musical complexity did not correlate in our study. Second, they expressed concerns about the comparability of the musical and visual stimuli we used. In this commentary, I show how these claims and the premises on which they rely are debatable and how the results of Friedman et al. (2024) support our conclusion that stimulus information rather than abstract attributes like complexity drive evaluative judgments such as liking.