Artifacts that shape our mind

Is the evolution of material culture related to the development of the human mind and rationality?

That question is the starting point of the Material Minds project. The researchers have until 2027 and a funding of 10 million euros, granted by the Synergy Grant call of the European Research Council (ERC), to respond to this ambitious research premise. That is, to demonstrate how the visual perception of the material environment that surrounds us influences our way of thinking and, therefore, how we understand the world and how we organize ourselves according to that perception.

Between 2014 and 2018, researchers from the Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT, dependent on the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC)), and the Institute of Neurosciences (IN, mixed center of the CSIC and the Miguel Hernández University (UMH)), They carried out a pilot study in which they investigated the visual response of 113 individuals to ceramics belonging to the prehistory of Galicia. The cognitive response of these people to the pieces, from different styles and societies ranging from 4,000 BC to the turn of the era, demonstrated that the construction of the world begins with how we see it. Different material forms cause different ways of looking and interacting, or as INCIPIT director Felipe Criado Boado points out: “Eye movements are the most objective proof that there is a parallel evolution between the cognitive process, material development and changes in the society”.

On this basis, Felipe Criado and IN researcher Luis M. Martínez Otero proposed this new project, officially called the Xscape ERC Synergy Grant Project. An initiative that was joined by the participation of archaeologist Johannes Müller, director of the Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archeology at the University of Kiel (Germany), and Andy Clark, cognitive philosopher at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom) and co-author of the Paradigm of the Extended Mind, which places reasoning beyond the brain, specifically, in the interaction of the brain and the body with the world.

After the pilot experiment with ceramic material from the northwest of the peninsula, similar studies began in America and Europe with ceramics ranging from the Neolithic to the Iron Age (in Europe, from 5,000 to 500 BC). In February 2023, the experimental phase began in a laboratory (Material Minds Lab) built specifically for this project and which makes it possible to analyze the interrelationship between material culture and cognitive development. This experimental phase is expected to end around 2025. The research will include experiments with apes to see if they share perception biases with humans and if their behavior can be influenced by the materiality that surrounds them.

Everything stems from that first experiment that allowed us to observe how, just like monumental Neolithic landscapes (such as the Carnac Alignments, in France) direct our gaze towards the horizontal or, like the pyramids of Giza, in Egypt, they raise our eyes up towards the vertical, the visual exploration of prehistoric ceramics generated statistical regularities and stereotyped behaviors. “In our brain there are neural maps that set an internal model that determines the way we relate to the world. Our experiments show that there is a very close interaction between cultural changes and cognitive models, which provides a new perspective on how the mind allows the transmission of cultural values, beliefs and customs”, explains Boado.

The world is full of artifacts built by us humans: from small pieces of furniture to large cities. By interacting with these artifacts, such as using your fingers or a calculator to count, a mental process begins in which not only the brain participates, but thinking refers to the interaction between the brain, body, and environment; where all artifacts are included. Therefore, it is possible that the way in which the utensils are used influences our way of reasoning: “It may be that we internalize the process so much that it becomes part of ourselves, that we start to have perfectly integrated mental maps of all the artifacts that we use”, says Martínez Otero.

The relationship between material development and the cognitive process through vision implicitly includes a third element in the equation: social complexity. Through the study of 41 subprojects distributed in four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa and America), Material Minds tries to correlate the way of perceiving the different material styles with particular social contexts. “Perception cannot be separated from form. The shape of objects and the pattern of visual exploration they produce have changed throughout history, and they are connected to cognitive behavior in the same way that they are connected to the social realm, including social complexity”, the director explains. of the INCIPIT.

Therefore, the project is based on a premise: the individual’s way of thinking and reasoning is influenced by his or her culturally patterned style of observing and interacting with the world around him. And it is directed towards an objective: to create an explanatory model that demonstrates the role of material culture in the construction of our cognitive capacities. However, as the researchers point out, the correlation between the material, social conditions and thought does not mean causation.

Neolithic ceramic that generates a visual response similar to that generated by the Stonehenge monument. (Photo: XScape Project)

predictive processing

The conceptual framework of the project is the paradigm of predictive processing, that is, the idea that our perception of the world is not a passive capture of an objective external reality, but a process of active inference. “A kind of hallucination in which a circuit made up of perception, action and learning intervenes to analyze the sensory information we receive from the outside, and thus explain what surrounds us”, explains the IN researcher.

As in a kind of Platonic allegory of the cave, the human being initiates a cognitive process to match the world he sees with the world he knows, and thus make it understandable. It is a reciprocal relationship between the mind and the environment. First, the world provides the brain with a catalog of sensory impressions that are stored in our memory to interpret our surroundings. Second, our mind intervenes on the world to match the flow of sensations it generates with the internal conception we have of it. “It is a closed circuit of action and perception: we look, we see and we infer where to look next so that the world continues to seem understandable to us”, the researchers emphasize.

Thus, the human being observes the environment that surrounds him with the aim of matching the world that he perceives visually with the world that he knows mentally in such a way that, when there are discrepancies, an alert appears: “We use techniques to measure that error, such as eye tracking, electroencephalography or emotional recording techniques, because the error also generates a surprise that is accompanied by fleeting, but very specific, changes in our physiology”, explains Martínez Otero.

This neurobiological theory has been successfully applied in the study of other cognitive functions, such as in the construction of planning, orientation and spatial navigation models; or in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

Past, present and future

If we understand materiality as an element of anthropological communication, similar to language, its influence on cultural evolution throughout history must be accepted. That is, its role in the development of our internal model of the world and of the construction styles that act as a trace of our time and space. Every object is a cultural legacy, an impression of the mind at a given time, accessible to the present generation and capable of influencing future minds.

For this reason, the researchers intend to look into the mind of our ancestors through the objects they have left us to revalue, in the present, the influence of material culture in the development of the collective imagination. The first consequence would be to better understand how our mind works in a certain environment to correct deficits in cognitive development or to develop automaton devices with a behavior similar to that of human beings. “It could also be used to improve the vision of blind people, since one of the problems with current prostheses is how to manage attention: how to encode the information we receive from the outside to generate a message that the brain can understand”, points out Martínez Otero. .

If the hypotheses raised in the project are verified, “we should be very careful with the way we transform our natural environment and build our artificial world, since we are also building our minds. This, in times of pandemics and interaction with technological devices, does not seem exactly trivial”, conclude the researchers.

The Laboratory of Material Minds

INCIPIT is located in Santiago de Compostela, where 150 square meters are dedicated to the Material Minds Lab. This facility, unique in the world as it is the first specifically designed for the cognitive study of materiality with instrumental techniques, houses the experimental phase of the project through an integrated system of quantitative measurement, high resolution and in real time that, in turn, allows the manipulation of behavior and records in a closed loop through virtual and augmented reality.

A team of 18 researchers will use state-of-the-art technology to study the cognitive and cultural evolution of different populations: automatic eye tracking to know where each person is looking at all times and therefore what catches their attention in a scene; high-resolution cameras for volumetric reconstruction of body posture and facial expression; bracelets to measure physiological variables, such as heart rate, which allow us to understand our emotional state in different environments; and a virtual and augmented reality system to create different material contexts. To all this is added an immersive projection dome that transfers the aforementioned experiments to a 360-degree projection environment. (Source: Alejandro Parrilla García / CSIC)