How you respond to beauty may have more in common with your thinking skills than you realise.
Intellectual curiosity and an appreciation of beauty are both linked to stronger thinking skills.
People with these qualities tend to perform better on tests of literacy, numeracy and problem-solving.
The findings suggest that a person’s interest in ideas and aesthetic experiences may offer clues to their cognitive abilities.
Curiosity could encourage people to seek out opportunities to learn, while stronger thinking skills could make exploring complex ideas more rewarding, with both processes reinforcing one another.
A curious mind
Intellectual curiosity involves enjoying ideas, wanting to understand things and being drawn to questions that require thought.
Aesthetic sensitivity describes an appreciation of art and beauty.
Both qualities belong to the broader personality trait of openness to experience, which captures how receptive people are to unfamiliar ideas and experiences.
However, openness also includes creative imagination, and this aspect showed no significant independent association with cognitive performance.
Imagination, curiosity and an appreciation of beauty may overlap in everyday life, but their relationships with thinking skills differ.
Curiosity and cognitive skills
The conclusions come from an analysis of almost 68,000 people across 12 countries, including Canada, Germany, Italy and New Zealand.
They completed personality questionnaires alongside assessments of literacy, numeracy and the ability to solve problems as circumstances change.
Intellectual curiosity and aesthetic sensitivity were linked to better performance across all three assessments, even after accounting for other personality traits.
Connections across cultures
The connections between personality and cognitive skills also varied between countries.
Educational systems and cultural practices could help explain such differences, although the reasons remain uncertain.
Overall, the findings link both a desire to understand the world and an appreciation of its beauty with stronger thinking skills.
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The study was published in the journal Large-scale Assessments in Education (Rammstedt et al., 2026).
