Abstract
Pictorial representation is a key human behaviour. Cultures around the world have made images to convey information about living kinds, objects and ideas for at least 75,000 years, in forms as diverse as cave paintings, religious icons and emojis. However, styles of pictorial representation vary greatly between cultures and historical periods. In particular, they can differ in figurativeness, i.e. varying from detailed depictions of subjects to stylised abstract forms. Here we show that pictorial styles can be shaped by intergroup contact. We use data from experimental microsocieties to show that drawings produced by groups in contact tended to become more figurative and transparent to outsiders, whereas in isolated groups drawings tended to become abstract and opaque. These results indicate that intergroup contact is likely to be an important factor in the cultural evolution of pictorial representation, because the need to communicate with outsiders ensures that some figurativeness is retained over time. We discuss the implications of this finding for understanding the history and anthropology of art, and the parallels with sociolinguistics and language evolution.
Highlights
Pictorial representations are ubiquitous in human culture
Drawings in the contact condition may become slightly less detailed so as to reduce the drawing effort, but they still maintain largely inter-subjectively recognisable figures. These findings support the hypothesis that intergroup contact influences the development of styles and transparency of pictorial representation
Our results show that drawings from the contact condition are more transparent and more figurative than drawings from the isolation and control conditions
Summary
Pictorial representations are ubiquitous in human culture. We find them in visual art, pictographic writing systems, road signs, graphic design, book illustrations, comics and animations, just to mention a few examples (Drucker and McVarish 2009; Harthan 1997; Hockney and Gayford 2016; Sabin 2001). Pictorial representations are tangible expressions of ideas, mental models and ways of understanding the world They are highly versatile: they can visualise simple physical objects as well as very complex and abstract concepts and situations; as such, at the individual level, they are external cognitive tools that help elaborate, manipulate, store and retrieve ideas that would be difficult for the mind alone to handle, such as beliefs about supernatural agents (Mithen 1998, 2004, 2009). Pictorial representations are effective attention-catching devices, especially when depictive and decorative techniques enhance their aesthetic appeal (Donald 2009; Gell 1992). Humans have made use of pictorial representations since before the Upper Palaeolithic (Bahn 2016; Henshilwood et al 2002), and image-making is likely to have played an important role in the evolution of human cognition and sociality (Renfrew and Morley 2009)
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