Data and code from: Do infants have a sense of beauty? A study using kinetic dot displays

The present study investigated the emergence of a visual preference for beautiful kinetic dot displays during development. The displays were previously judged for relative beauty by an independent group of adults. Preferential looking was measured with an eye tracker in 4- to 24-month-old infants and adults. Analysis of the overall preferential looking response over the 5 s of stimulus display indicated that adults’ judgment predicted preferential looking at all ages tested. Analysis of the time-course of this attentional response indicated two different mechanisms: (1) a fast orienting response toward motion patterns that were not judged as beautiful by adults, and (2) a slower but longer duration response toward motion patterns that were judged as beautiful by adults. The contribution of these two mechanisms to the overall preferential looking response changed with age in a consistent manner. Because the beauty ratings of adults were associated with a later but longer duration visual ..., , # Data and code from: Do infants have a sense of beauty? A study using kinetic dot displays

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.msbcc2g9d](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.msbcc2g9d)

## Description of the data and file structure

The repository contains the data and scripts necessary to reproduce the results and figures related to the article and supplementary materials by Mottier, H., Pascalis, O., Quinn, P. C., Méary, D. (2026). Do Infants Have a Sense of Beauty? A Study Using Kinetic Dot Displays. Accepted for publication in *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.*

The study involved two tasks.

In the ***preference judgment task***, an independent group of adults judged the relative beauty of the dot displays, which were presented in pairs.

In the ***visual preference task***, the same pairs of dot displays were shown to adults and infants, without instructions, while their eye movements were measured with an Eyelink® 1000 system (SR Research Ltd., Mississauga, Ontario, C..., The study involved human infants and their parents. The participant data have been anonymized. The study is not a health-related study and was not involving extended collection of personal information. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of the declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the ethics committee from the University Grenoble-Alpes under the reference IRB00010290-2018-02-06-39., , **Changes after Mar 12, 2026:** 

**Changes after Mar 13, 2026:** 

**Changes after Mar 31, 2026:** Following proofreading, figure formating has been updated.