Abstract
We live in a cluttered visual world that is overflowing with information, the continuous processing of which would be a truly daunting task. Nevertheless, our brains have evolved to select which part of a visual scene is to be prioritized and analysed in detail, and which parts can be discarded or analysed at a later stage. This selection is in part determined by the visual stimuli themselves, and is known as “selective attention”, which, in turn, determines how we explore and interact with our environment, including the distinct human artefacts produced in different socio-cultural contexts. Here we hypothesize that visual responses and material objects should therefore co-evolve to reflect changes in social complexity and culture throughout history. Using eye-tracking, we analysed the eye scan paths in response to prehistoric pottery ranging from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age (ca 6000–2000 BP), finding that each ceramic style caused a particular pattern of visual exploration. Horizontal movements become dominant in earlier periods, while vertical movements are more frequent in later periods that were marked by greater social complexity.
Highlights
This research, by testing how visual cognition is affected by different sorts of archaeological pottery styles belonging to different chronologies and social conditions, provides direct evidence that cognition is in our mind, but underpinned in some way by the world around us
We used a linear discriminant analysis based on the Vertical Index (Vi) computed from the eye movements of each participant in order to investigate to what extent we could predict the pots they were viewing in each case (Methods)
This embodiment of the social in the pot would be the common under the two main but distinct processes to explain the extraordinary expansion of this pottery throughout vast areas of Western Eurasia[29]. This general pattern of change in the Vi over time is relevant, as firstly, there is a horizontal bias in natural images that imposes a horizontal visual exploratory behaviour[36,37] which must be compensated for by a change in the structure of human artefacts; and, secondly, because it is easier to move the eyes horizontally, as the muscles involved are not antigravity muscles[38]. It is a well-known fact that the world around us displays consistent statistical properties that are deemed to be essential in order to understand how the human visual system analyzes images[39,40,41,42,43]
Summary
This research, by testing how visual cognition is affected by different sorts of archaeological pottery styles belonging to different chronologies and social conditions, provides direct evidence that cognition is in our mind, but underpinned in some way by the world around us. The material structure of the world and the constituent elements of human cognition should co-evolve as the social structure and cultural context develop over time To investigate these issues, we used a collection of prehistoric pottery in which each pot characterizes a specific ceramic style and the environmental context (see Supplementary Information SI1 and SI2), and as a behavioral readout, the patterns of spontaneous exploratory eye movements they motivated, which were recorded by eye-tracking[9,10,11,12,13]. Given that the basic functional mechanisms of the brain are similar today and in the recent past, the differential influence of artifacts on observers should not be affected by using a sample of a current population Using this approach, we examined two different but related hypotheses: firstly, to consider whether or not the material configuration of the object (i.e., the material style it represents) imposes a strong bias on our visual behaviour. That there was through time an evolution of the material structure of the pots and the visual exploratory patterns they evoke, that parallels changes in other characteristics of the societies to which each material style belongs, including their degree of social complexity[22]
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