Developmental Constraints on Learning and Liking Music
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Pleasure from sensory experience is thought to arise from the interplay between learned expectations and incoming stimuli, yet how this relationship develops across the lifespan is poorly understood. Lifetime exposure to culturally familiar stimuli confounds maturational differences in learning with differences in prior knowledge. We circumvent this problem by exposing children (5-12 years), adolescents (13-17 years), and young adults (19-24 years; total n = 237) to the Bohlen-Pierce scale, a musical system with no cultural tradition, and we manipulate exposure within a single session. All age groups formed expectations proportional to exposure, but only adolescents and adults were sensitive to structural violations in both familiarity judgments and aesthetic preference. While adults’ preference tracked exposure consistent with predictive coding accounts of reward, children preferences declined with repeated exposure.The coupling between structural learning and hedonic experience increased across development, providing causal developmental evidence that pleasure from structured sensory input is constrained by the maturation of statistical learning.
Institution: Brown University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7161306943