FROM HORIZONTAL TO VERTICAL: CROSS-CULTURAL EVIDENCE FOR THE CO-EVOLUTION OF VISUAL BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

According to a predictive processing framework, perception operates under informational and metabolic constraints, and is understood as an active process of hypothesis-testing in which sensory sampling is guided by prior expectations and epistemic value.
Using this framework, we had demonstrated that exploratory eye movements covary with the material style of archaeological artifacts, which change over time and according to the scale of complexity of each society. They showed a historical shift from predominantly horizontal eye scan-paths in early egalitarian cultures to a greater vertical exploration in later hierarchical societies.
We now gauge the robustness of findings across culturally, linguistically, and demographically diverse populations. We quantified visual scan-paths in response to a comprehensive ceramic corpus from northwestern Iberia, spanning from approximately 6500 to 2000 BCE. Participants (n=ca 500) belong to populations in Europe, Africa, and South America.
We found that the previously reported systematic relationship between ceramic style, historical period, social complexity, and scan path geometry was present in all social groups, regardless of age, gender, sex, language, cultural background, and place of birth and residence.
These results indicate that the correlation between material culture and visual exploration reflects a fundamental relationship between social complexity, material form, and perceptual sampling. Our results suggest that archaeological artifacts function as externalized information bottlenecks that encode, maintained, and transmit information about cultural context and social structure across generations. We show that historically situated material culture provides a powerful experimental testing ground for investigating the emergence, evolution, and constraints of the human mind.