Evaluative judgment—i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked—is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain’s sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

评价性判断（即评估刺激在多大程度上被喜欢或不喜欢）是认知的基本方面，有助于比较和选择替代方案，确定行动并确定优先次序。神经影像学研究表明，评价性判断涉及将感觉信息投射到奖励电路上。为了研究评估性判断是基于特定于情态还是基于情态一般属性，我们比较了平衡，轮廓，对称性和复杂性在听觉和视觉方式上影响喜好的反应的程度。我们发现，除了轮廓以外，对于所有感觉模态的四个属性中的任何一个都没有显着的相关性。这表明，评价性判断主要依赖于大脑感觉皮层中拟定并传递给奖励电路的特定于情态的感觉表示，而不是抽象的情态通用表示。个体特质的艺术体验，开放的体验以及对美学的渴望与设计或构图属性对喜好的影响程度相关，但在感官形态和属性上不一致，也暗示了特定于形态的影响。