An experiment involving IN CSIC-UMH analyzes how we look at Greek pottery to study the evolution of art

25 de March de 2025

• The study is part of the XSCAPE project on Material Minds, funded with over 10 million euros by the European Research Council (ERC).
• The research shows that the more complex the pieces are, the less predictable eye movements become, and the more elaborate the cognitive processing involved is.

A team from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Kiel University conducted an eye-tracking experiment on ancient Greek pottery at the National Archaeological Museum (MAN). The study took advantage of the exhibition Between Chaos and Cosmos: Nature in Ancient Greece, which displays pieces from the museum’s exceptional collection of Greek and South Italian pottery.

The experiment is part of the XSCAPE Material Minds project, which includes Luis Miguel Martínez Otero, head of The Visual Analogy Laboratory at the Institute for Neurosciences (IN), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Miguel Hernández University (UMH) of Elche. The first phase of this study was carried out at the Material Minds Lab of INCIPIT-CSIC and involved the free observation of photographic images and 3D models of Greek pottery. The images were projected on a screen while participants' eye movements were recorded using an eye-tracking device.

One of the eye-tracking experiments conducted at the Material Minds Lab of INCIPIT-CSIC. Source: INCIPIT-CSIC

In the second phase of the experiment, conducted at the National Archaeological Museum (MAN), participants directly observed works from the Between Chaos and Cosmos exhibition. Volunteers from the museum’s technical team, the Friends of MAN Association (AMAN), and cultural volunteers participated in the study.

This experimental design allowed researchers not only to study cognitive reactions triggered by observing the unique shapes of classical Greek pottery but also to address museological aspects, such as evaluating the difference between viewing a digital image of an object and directly contemplating it in a museum setting.

The interest in this experiment with classical pottery lies in the fact that these materials are exceptionally well-documented, preserved, and dated at MAN. The selection of pieces represents the evolution of an artistic style over a relatively short period. This allowed the research team to assess how stylistic changes relate to cognitive processing changes. The results indicate that the physical complexity of the pieces (derived from their shape and decoration) correlates with the complexity of gaze patterns and the cognitive processing involved.

Photo: A participant in the experiment observes the works of the exhibition ‘Between Chaos and Cosmos’ at the Spanish National Archaeological Museum (MAN). Source: INCIPIT-CSIC.

More complex pieces, in terms of shape or decoration, result in less predictable, more diverse eye movements and higher cognitive loads. These findings also demonstrate that fundamental cognitive strategies enable us to interact adaptively with our environment, that these strategies can be quantified, and that they are socially shared, as they correlate with the complexity of the societies in which these visual stimuli were created.

The novelty of these findings is that they provide a formal and quantitative metric that allows, for the first time, the study of how and why different artistic styles evolve, going through various phases until they exhaust themselves and are replaced by new ones, opening up a new and fascinating field of research.

The data also reveal a similar perceptual behavior among observers when comparing the original pieces in the exhibition with those presented in a laboratory setting. These results offer objective data and measurements regarding the presentation of collections and the impact of exhibitions on the public, serving as a tool for assessing and improving museum display designs.

About the XSCAPE-Material Minds Project

The project Material Minds: Exploring the Interactions between Predictive Brains, Cultural Artefacts, and Embodied Visual Search (XSCAPE), funded by the European Research Council under the Synergy Grant ERC-2020-SyG 951631, brings together a transdisciplinary team that combines neuroscience, archaeology, history, cognitive science, and philosophy.

It includes teams distributed across Europe, led by researcher Felipe Criado-Boado from the Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT-CSIC, Spain), researcher Luis Miguel Martínez from IN CSIC-UMH (Alicante, Spain), researcher Andy Clark from the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), and Professor J. Müller from the Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University (Germany).

Their objective is to study how materiality influences cognitive and mental processing to determine whether material culture modifies patterns of attention and information processing. This research adopts a multidisciplinary and experimental approach, combining archaeological and historical studies with cognitive science investigations on visual behavior, attention, and extended cognition. The study analyzes material forms from different cultures, historical periods, geographical areas, and socio-historical conditions. The ultimate goal is to identify the fundamental principles governing cognitive change driven by materiality—and to determine its influence on the evolution of the human mind.

More information: https://youtu.be/xYD3QnEoE6o?si=mndxV0LnXgNMnIZh

Source: XSCAPE Project and Spanish National Archaeological Museum (MAN).