Developmental Stages in Children's Aesthetic Responses

Abstract

For some time we have been trying to identify developmental stages in children's responses to paintings. This article is primarily a description of our findings to date. Although the findings are still tentative, the line of thought presented might nevertheless be of interest to readers of this journal. A few explanatory remarks seem necessary before we present our findings, though we keep them to a minimum here in order to save space for the descriptive material. The responses of individuals to paintings differ on many dimensions. Our central problem has been to discover which of these many kinds of differences are cognitive-developmental in character. In looking for answers we have had in mind a parallel with the work of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Selman: we were seeking a cognitive-developmental account of aesthetic response. One motivation was a conviction about the autonomous character of aesthetic experience, i.e., a belief that it is sui generis in an important sense. Aesthetic experience is not moral experience, just as morality is not science. Many philosophers have regarded these three as basically different modes of experience.1 This suggests, to a cognitive-developmentalist, that each of the three will have its own developmental history, distinct in the way that Kohlberg's stages of moral judgment are distinct from Piaget's stages of scientific