Upper Palaeolithic art as a perceptual search for magical images

ABSTRACT

Perceptual psychology has provided a number of revealing insights into the phenomenon of palaeoart. The value of the discipline is underlined by the fact that it has provided new ways of exploring how Upper Palaeolithic cave art first arose, both on a theoretical and a practical level. Despite this, the approach has been accused of overstating the importance of perceptual factors to the detriment of cultural criteria. In this paper, I demonstrate how perceptual psychology can be exploited to provide useful hypotheses regarding the cultural issues associated with early parietal art.

KEYWORDS:

• Cave art
• perceptual psychology
• hypothesis-testing
• visual imagery
• darkness

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek Hodgson

Derek Hodgson has published many papers on Palaeolithic Art in academic journals and has lectured widely on the subject as an invited speaker at international conferences. He is noted for research demonstrating how perceptual psychology and neuroscience can provide new insights into the way the depictions of animals first arose. He has recently published a book on the subject entitled The Roots of Visual Depiction in Art.