ABSTRACT
Although stimulus preferences are usually regarded as control processes in being determined by experiential factors such as learning and habituation, there may be some unlearned determinants, or structural feature aspects, of stimulus preferences even in the human. Kinship studies of stimulus preferences, with reasonable controls for environmental determinants, are not to our knowledge available but are in principle possible. Another methodological tack can be taken. If learned and unlearned are exhaustive classifications, the demonstration that a stimulus preference is unlearned can proceed by showing that learning has been controlled or ruled out as a likely cause of observed preferences. The adequacy of some current theories in this respect will be examined in what follows, together with a scanning of the evidence in four areas of stimulus preference: color–form, position, novelty, and compound–component. The stimulus preferences for color–form and for position were both dimensional preferences.
