Abstract: Toward a general model of aesthetic appreciation - the role of expertise and culture (Kohinoor M. Darda & Emily S. Cross) The arts exist in many different forms including painting, music, and dance, can be abstract or representative of something around us, and are enjoyed by art experts and non-experts. If all human beings across the world share a common capacity for experiencing, appreciating, and evaluating artworks, it is plausible that the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms are also common across cultures. However, existing research on the universality and crosscultural mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation is limited as most studies have focused on what are commonly called as WEIRD populations who represent as much as 80% of research participants, but only about 12% of the world’s population. Previous research suggests that all individuals show a preference for representational art over abstract art, although this preference is lower for art experts than non-experts, and there exists an ingroup bias such that participants from one culture prefer art originating from their own culture compared to from another culture. However, whether this ingroup bias is modulated by art expertise and whether this modulation of the ingroup bias as well as preference for representational art is consistent across cultures is not known. In the current study, across two experiments with N=100 each, we used abstract and representational paintings and dance stimuli of Indian and western origin, and invited Indian and western participants, including art and dance experts and non-experts to rate art stimuli on beauty and liking. Results suggest that as predicted, a modulation by expertise in the preference for representational art over abstract art exists, but only in western participants, and only for paintings. Similarly, as predicted, the ingroup bias exists (although only for dance) and is modulated by expertise, but only in western participants. Thus, the current findings both inform and constrain understanding of the universality (or not) of aesthetic judgements, and caution against generalising models of aesthetic appreciation to non-western populations. They set the stage for aesthetic research to posit a new set of ‘why’ questions that take cross-cultural differences across different art forms into account, and have implications for combining universal appreciation and cultural context in a unifying model of visual art appreciation. ----- Dr. Kohinoor Monish Darda Postdoctoral Researcher Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology, University of Glasgow, UK