Hi Louis,

I live in Australia, and so am quite familiar with Bower birds, (although there aren't any on the west coast, where I currently live).

Interestingly, some Bower birds do more than accumulate brightly coloured objects to decorate their love nests.

Many use a sophisticated artistic technique called "forced perspective" and, ranking the objects they collect by size, they create an optical illusion so that to the potential mates observing them, they appear larger, and so (presumably) more attractive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective

The males that do this most effectively appear to be more successful in securing mates.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100909/full/news.2010.458.html

.

Obviously spending all this time and effort making and decorating a gorgeous display ground, unconsciously incorporating optical illusions, and then dancing and singing in the resulting love-nest, does not contribute to the survival of the male bird's offspring at all.

It just attracts mates that allow him to have offspring in the first place.

It is not necessary for the bird to consciously understand what he is doing. The male birds that make the best use of design, colour and perspective have the most offspring, and selection pressures ensure those birds end up dominating the population. It's a Darwinian basis to art! (But let me say, I don't assume it explains ALL artistic endeavor).

In fact this is a classic example of sexual selection, where males make costly sacrifices to demonstrate their fitness to any females who are prospective mates and who happen to be listening.

Like a peacock's tail, all this effort is most likely an example of Zahavi's "Handicap principle",

( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle).

Male Australian Lyre birds have extravagant tails, and build dancing/display grounds for themselves, and they also imitate other bird songs (or anything else they happen to hear) to impress the lady Lyre birds...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2UcKFtwS5o

.

In an earlier comment you mentioned dance. I suspect that this sort of movement may have been very significant in human evolution.

Animals frequently expend energy unnecessarily, and typically this is done to signal their fitness to other animals,. Zahavi's famous example was certain species of antelope that jump high in the air, on the spot, (rather than fleeing) when they see or smell a lion or other predator.

The exuberant jumping tells the lion that;

a) this antelope already knows the lion is there, and

b) not to bother chasing this particular antelope, as it obviously has plenty of energy to spare, and could run all day if it wanted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting

(If you think this has little to do with humans, I'd recommend you deeply consider the contemporary meanings of the word "swagger").

Animals frequently waste time, energy and other resources to signal messages  to their potential predators, rivals of their own species, or possible mates. 

To anthropomorphise, the message pretty much every time is "Hey, look how fit I am, I can do this for no reason!"

The signal is either, "I am not an easy victim, go and bother someone else ", or else it is "I am a supremely healthy individual, you should mate with me". And the more costly a signal such as this is, the more valid it appears to the target.

If the signal is effective, the apparent "waste" of energy is actually highly adaptive and so it will be selected for and the behaviour will become more common. . 

In a similar fashion, many male animals engage in some form of unnecessary ritualised movement to attract the attention of potential mates. Various species of Birds of Paradise have males that not only display costly and extravagant plumage (just like peacocks and Lyre birds) but that also engage in extremely complex mating dances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7QZnwKqopo

.

Here's a male Bower bird doing his love-dance (apologies for the cheesy voice over);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzZj21Gs4U

Louis, I suspect that you have pointed to something crucial in human evolution by mentioning dance.

Raising a human child is a collaborative effort.

The ability to dance fluidly with a partner is not just a demonstration of your personal physical ability, it is also a demonstration of your ability to cooperate and synchronize movements, and more importantly to empathise, to compromise and make allowances, and then to act in concert with your partner.

In early human societies I would suggest that males who could dance well with you were quite possibly damn-good prospective mates. They either cared about you deeply, or were capable of acting as though you were equal partners even if they didn't. 

I can imagine this sort of sexual selection encouraging rapidly and increasingly complex ritual, musical expression, decoration and display.

So (from an evolutionary psychologist's point of view), it might appear that art, ( or aesthetic endeavor of any kind), is just  a ploy (when enacted by us males of the species)  to get laid. Please discuss.

:)

Kind regards,

Paul.

My understanding is that primate "art" is not very creative in that primates don't seem to represent objects of their imagination in their drawings. Tetsuro Matzusawa's lab in Japan has done a series of experiments on this; for instance, when given a piece of paper with a circle on it, chimpanzees will scribble along the edges of the circle (focusing on what's there), whereas young children will turn the circle into a face by filling in the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. (focusing on what's missing). See attached article

Thank you, Adrian. The article you have provided is fascinating.

The references I provided in the initial post of the question bear out what you say: in the case of both Homo erectus and chimpanzees, the aesthetic decisions are of a formal nature, such as the use of symmetry and repetition in composition. In the case of chimps, color is used in a seemingly purposeful way. Neither species attempts to represent perceived objects pictorially, as far as I have seen. A student of mine mentioned a case where a chimp's paintings vaguely reflected what was in its visual field, but I haven't found a reference to this, and I am skeptical, because this would probably imply some degree of subjective interpretation on the part of the human observer.

I have avoided using the word "art" because it is a modern Western cultural construct without much consensus regarding its meaning. "Aesthetic creation" is somewhat more open, involving the production of objects with the purpose of producing certain kinds of sensations in the minds of both creators and observers.

I would hesitate to correlate creativity with pictorial representation, though, since abstract works have been vehicles of aesthetic creation from the earliest objects made by modern Homo sapiens to the present.

While modern Homo sapiens developed representational skills, it is interesting to find that we still value abstraction as part of aesthetic creation, and that we seem to share this appreciation of the formal aspects of our creations with other species (chimps and Homo erectus).

It will be interesting to see what else is posted on this thread!

In his book, The Biology of Art, Desmond Morris explains that Congo - the most prolific chimpanzee painter at the London Zoo - consistently demonstrated the following behaviours during various drawing and painting experiments.

A. A noticeable degree of intense focus on the blank sheets of paper presented to him and especially the markings per se he produced.

B. An aversion to being interrupted while drawing or painting.

C. Restricting his mark-making to the blank paper itself.

D. Periodically marking blank paper with a fan pattern that underwent numerous repetitions over time.

E. Balancing offset figures on the papers handed to him. For example, a square figure presented to him just to the right of center on the paper was balanced by mark-making an equal distance to the left of center.

F. A quantifiable progression in the styles of his compositional and calligraphic skills. (Although Congo never reached the representational stage, he went through numerous scribbling and diagrammatic stages that seem to be precursors to representational drawing, and that are found in human children.)

G. Finding his drawing or painting to be a rewarding activity in itself without any connection to outside positive reinforcement.

H. Exhibiting behavior seemingly intended to show when Congo was finished with a given painting and either ready for another blank sheet or ready to re-perceive the next situation as a different sort of play time or 'time to do something else.' (Often he was observed to play on the high chair and tray that was used to seat him when he was painting. In this way, Congo seemed to treat painting as a special kind of activity that held a different value for him than regular play or roughhousing.)

David, You should not worry about this,

"and I am skeptical, because this would probably imply some degree of subjective interpretation on the part of the human observer." 

There would be no meaning in it for us if we could not from a subjective response to it. This is something that bedevils science!!! It's exactly what's being search for. Louis's insight through his understanding of perception and knowledge base is the right approach. What needs to be looked at is behaviour more than the marks themselves. Level of engagement, signs as to what the process means to the primate. 

As an artist the process of painting or make making is ground zero, i.e. activity over content - engagement in gesture making etc. That is not 'conceptual', not formulated and not about the world. The 'where' (awareness of self in this case) comes before the 'what', and all that!

What about dolphins in ocean and their artistic way of swimming?

Thank you, Louis. Your summary of Congo the chimp's behavior illustrates very well what might be called "aesthetic decisions" and "aesthetic experiences" in a non-human primate.

Thanks for your insights, John. I should make clear that my skepticism is not a rejection of the idea, just caution, as doubting everthing is the foundation of scientific inquiry. The possibility of a chimp or other non-human species creating an image that represents phenomenal visual experience doesn't seem impossible, but it would be an extraordinary thing, so we should be rigorous about the evidence and how it is interpreted. Perhaps some evidence will show up on this thread!

So far, the article provided by Adrian and the summary of Morris's work provided by Luis fall short of claiming any sort of figurative (representational) image making.

Aashish: the idea of bodily movement as aesthetic expression is a beautiful one; with it we can conceive of animal life as being engaged in a vast cosmic dance, involving all sorts of dramatic interactions. When I posted the question I was thinking along the lines of visual aesthetic expression through the creation of objects, but if we expand the discussion to include dance, music, language, and performance there are many fruitful avenues to explore.

David,

An animal activity has a component that both the animal and ourself can observe which is the outer results of it.  But the activity is done not only for its outer results but for the whole feeling the animal is experiencing which include the outer results.  Morris said that  Congo did his painting activity not for rewards outside of the activity but because the activity seem to be rewarding, pleasurable to Congo: points A and B.  Morris said elsewhere that rewarding the primates with food did not enhance the painting performances but diminish the interest of the primates towards painting.  So the reward seems to stem from the activity itself.  It is clear that the observation of the markings are an important component of the intrinsic reward since  the styles evolved (points E, F) and the it is clear that Congo would not enjoy moving brush without paint on the canvas so momements alone would not do.  I think that the aesthetic pleasure or reward for Congo is less with the visual aesthetic than from an overall aesthetic pleasure of filling the canva space with colour lines and patches, a pleasure to change the world (the canva )with no other purpose than make and observe these changes.  It is a kind of play.

David,

I think that the question of primate arts is very important for understanding the journey of our primate ancestors to humanity.  I think it is primarily an artistico-religious journey.  I will call this the Eve hypothesis: the emergence of a new kind of feminine primate leadership.  I assume that in one tribe of primate a particularly devoted female, that I will call Eve, invented a dancing singing routine which conforted the tribe by the effect of the collective imitation emotional control; it was so effectively that this ritual was passed on in this tribe.  It is well known that some new cultural behaviors are sometime invented and pass down to new generations in primates.  The reason I think that this primary form of singing dancing not only was pass on but transformed through the baldwin effect the nervous system of these primates in such a way that they could gradually get conscious access to what I call the self-enactment room.  The self-enactment room is a component of all mammalian nervous system which evolved since the first mammal for cross-modal sensory motor integration.  My hypothesis is that the only difference between humans and primates is based on the conscious access versus unconscious access for primates.  ONce the conscious access began through the first religion-language-feminine leadership practice.  There is a lot to say about this and it would be much too long to elaborate.  But I think that the Eve hypothesis could be test on primates today by finding out a particularly bright female who would be talented in music dancing and train her in the wild for starting a similar cultural journey that I hypothesized began the journey to humanity.

Thank you again, Louis. As you point out, the cultural aspects (learned and transmitted behavior) are important to keep in mind, as well as the biological and anatomical aspects like neural development and cognitive capacities. I'm sure there was an important cultural component to the spread of representational art in the Upper Paleolithic.

Of course the act of chimps painting is a case of cross-species cultural transmission, in itself a fascinating concept. I have a betta fish that "dances" along with my hands when I move them rythmically, and he opens and closes his mouth when he sees me do the same. I'm not sure who is imitating who, but the interaction is great fun for me, and I imagine for him too, although it's hard to know what's going on in his fishy little mind.

David,

Human evolution is mostly a cultural only evolution.  This transition from primate to human is the transition from the biological to the cultural evolution.  That was made possible through the biological evolution culturally driven  through dancing singing female leadership.  How?  For cultural evolution to be possible two prerequisites are necessarily: capacity to imitate behavior and capacity to invent new behavior.  The key to both capacity was the access to the self-enactment room in order to become a theatrical animal.  The singing dancing practices have trigger a rapid biological evolution of all that were missing for that access through the Balwin effect.

I will close the topic here.

I haven't seen this information anywhere else. Maybe to you will tell zoologists working with chimpanzees and gorilli.

Chimpanzees (the closest Primate evolution to Human) can draw simple graphics (lines, shapes) as a child of preschool age. They can play childish games, they share food (now I seen it in the Internt).

I think that a preference for symmetry may be considered a component of aesthetic creation. This preference was mentioned yesterday on this thread by Louis in reference the creative work of Congo, a chimp in the London zoo: "Balancing offset figures on the papers handed to him. For example, a square figure presented to him just to the right of center on the paper was balanced by mark-making an equal distance to the left of center."

Careful and repeated use of symmetry in the manufacture of handaxes may be seen in Homo erectus from about 500,000 years ago, around the same time this species was engraving geometric designs into shells, as I noted in the initial post of this thread. See the following open access article:

Hodgson, Derek (2011). “The first appearance of symmetry in the human lineage: where perception meets art,” in Symmetry (MDPI AG), vol. 3, no. 1, March 2011, pp. 37-53 (http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/1/37, updated: March 1, 2011, access: March 17, 2015).

Interesting question.What is your motivation?

I seem to recall that some male birds build displays to attract females. Also the nests of some birds are aesthetic. Although, not primates, they apparently have an aesthetic sense.

In fact, much of what we humans judge as aesthetically pleasing has a natural basis.

Dear Antonio:

The ideas behind the question grew out of discussions in an undergraduate art history class called Artistic Development: From Prehistory to the Romanesque Period, and a graduate seminar called Art in the Embodied Mind. More directly, a couple of days ago I privately sent ResearchGate member John Jupe a picture of a chimp with brushes, paints, and paintings, and we were discussing chimps and aesthetics and such, so I came up with the idea of opening up the conversation to all interested RG members. So far I have not been disappointed.

Thank you for your thoughts. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have avoided the word "art", prefering the broader concept of "aesthetics", although this too may be a bit vague. At any rate, as long as we are considering principles like symmetry and balance in composition, I think it is very interesting to open ourselves up to the possibilities of thinking about animal movements (dolphins have been mentioned) and constructions (like the birds you mention, and beehives, to cite just two examples), in aesthetic terms. The songs of birds are another interesting field. I have seen studies (I don't remember where) showing that in some bird species only the basic foundations of the songs are innate, while the elaborations are learned from members of the previous generation.

All of this may help us put human aesthetic experience in its broader context, within the field of animal intelligence, animal consciousness, and -why not?- animal aesthetics. (By "animal" I mean here non-human animal species; of course we are animals too.)

Comparing chimpanzee, hominid, and early modern human mortuary behaviour;

http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba66/feat1.shtml

Neanderthal rock art;

http://www.livescience.com/47640-abstract-neanderthal-cave-engraving-discovered.html

.

Neanderthal body painting and  beads;

>

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1023.full

.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13536-neanderthals-wore-makeup-and-liked-to-chat.html#.VQjjeuF8vtI

Regards,

Paul.

The male bower birds build very aesthetic nests in order to attract females.  Their designs are varied and their art is beautifull . The more spectacular the display, the more likely they are to attract a parter to mate with. They choose their colors based on what color they think will give them a better chance of seducing a female.All these objects are brought and carefully arranged by the males.

 http://www.viralforest.com/bower-bird/

The palm of reproductive visual art for the sake of camouflage goes to cephalopod.

Thanks, Paul and Louis, for your interesting and pertinent contributions to the discussion.

I found this open access article:

Morris-Kay, Gilian M. "The evolution of human artistic creativity," in Journal of Anatomy (Wiley), vol. 216, no. 2, pp. 158-176 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joa.2010.216.issue-2/issuetoc, access: March 18, 2015).

Hi Louis,

I live in Australia, and so am quite familiar with Bower birds, (although there aren't any on the west coast, where I currently live).

Interestingly, some Bower birds do more than accumulate brightly coloured objects to decorate their love nests.

Many use a sophisticated artistic technique called "forced perspective" and, ranking the objects they collect by size, they create an optical illusion so that to the potential mates observing them, they appear larger, and so (presumably) more attractive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective

The males that do this most effectively appear to be more successful in securing mates.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100909/full/news.2010.458.html

.

Obviously spending all this time and effort making and decorating a gorgeous display ground, unconsciously incorporating optical illusions, and then dancing and singing in the resulting love-nest, does not contribute to the survival of the male bird's offspring at all.

It just attracts mates that allow him to have offspring in the first place.

It is not necessary for the bird to consciously understand what he is doing. The male birds that make the best use of design, colour and perspective have the most offspring, and selection pressures ensure those birds end up dominating the population. It's a Darwinian basis to art! (But let me say, I don't assume it explains ALL artistic endeavor).

In fact this is a classic example of sexual selection, where males make costly sacrifices to demonstrate their fitness to any females who are prospective mates and who happen to be listening.

Like a peacock's tail, all this effort is most likely an example of Zahavi's "Handicap principle",

( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle).

Male Australian Lyre birds have extravagant tails, and build dancing/display grounds for themselves, and they also imitate other bird songs (or anything else they happen to hear) to impress the lady Lyre birds...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2UcKFtwS5o

.

In an earlier comment you mentioned dance. I suspect that this sort of movement may have been very significant in human evolution.

Animals frequently expend energy unnecessarily, and typically this is done to signal their fitness to other animals,. Zahavi's famous example was certain species of antelope that jump high in the air, on the spot, (rather than fleeing) when they see or smell a lion or other predator.

The exuberant jumping tells the lion that;

a) this antelope already knows the lion is there, and

b) not to bother chasing this particular antelope, as it obviously has plenty of energy to spare, and could run all day if it wanted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting

(If you think this has little to do with humans, I'd recommend you deeply consider the contemporary meanings of the word "swagger").

Animals frequently waste time, energy and other resources to signal messages  to their potential predators, rivals of their own species, or possible mates. 

To anthropomorphise, the message pretty much every time is "Hey, look how fit I am, I can do this for no reason!"

The signal is either, "I am not an easy victim, go and bother someone else ", or else it is "I am a supremely healthy individual, you should mate with me". And the more costly a signal such as this is, the more valid it appears to the target.

If the signal is effective, the apparent "waste" of energy is actually highly adaptive and so it will be selected for and the behaviour will become more common. . 

In a similar fashion, many male animals engage in some form of unnecessary ritualised movement to attract the attention of potential mates. Various species of Birds of Paradise have males that not only display costly and extravagant plumage (just like peacocks and Lyre birds) but that also engage in extremely complex mating dances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7QZnwKqopo

.

Here's a male Bower bird doing his love-dance (apologies for the cheesy voice over);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzZj21Gs4U

Louis, I suspect that you have pointed to something crucial in human evolution by mentioning dance.

Raising a human child is a collaborative effort.

The ability to dance fluidly with a partner is not just a demonstration of your personal physical ability, it is also a demonstration of your ability to cooperate and synchronize movements, and more importantly to empathise, to compromise and make allowances, and then to act in concert with your partner.

In early human societies I would suggest that males who could dance well with you were quite possibly damn-good prospective mates. They either cared about you deeply, or were capable of acting as though you were equal partners even if they didn't. 

I can imagine this sort of sexual selection encouraging rapidly and increasingly complex ritual, musical expression, decoration and display.

So (from an evolutionary psychologist's point of view), it might appear that art, ( or aesthetic endeavor of any kind), is just  a ploy (when enacted by us males of the species)  to get laid. Please discuss.

:)

Kind regards,

Paul.

Paul,

Very interesting and entertaining. The best answer I have come across on RG!

See if this means anything to you.

Vision-Space: The Protagonists: http://youtu.be/516mjrU3aC0

As an artist I am trying to establish some fundamentals about visual experiential reality. Noting to do with camera's that's for sure. I think the implicit form of awareness is pretty much ubiquitous?

Then there is the one on dance that you will get! David helped me out on it.

Vision-Space: Implications in medium of dance: http://youtu.be/RTtpHy6XTgc

Cheers - John

Thanks John,

I always appreciate positive feedback.

:}

I am insanely busy at the moment, but I  will respond in the next few days to your links.

Regards,

Paul.

Perhaps one other point: The origin of aesthetic preferences among animals and their manifestation in the creations of human relatives have been a field of study (and theorization) since long - under the term "evolutionary aesthetics":

https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=de&q=evolutionary+aesthetics

Paul,

In mating, females of many species prefer bigger male and it may be the case with Bower bird female and it may explain why male bowerbird creates these forced perspective in order to appear bigger to the female when standing in particular places in the nest.

''When seeking a mate, the female stands within the avenue to view the court where the male entices her by squawking, hopping and waving a colourful ornament. To determine what she sees, the researchers took photos of the court from within the avenue and realized that the stones, bones and shells lining the court floor were arranged by size — from small to large — creating an optical illusion known as forced perspective.

"This is a fascinating example of the complexity of animal behaviors," comments James Ha, a cognitive behavior researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. "I can't think of any other animal that clearly uses optical illusions."

If bowerbirds see as humans do, the small-to-large gradient tricks the female into perceiving a court lined with an extremely even pattern or one that is smaller than it is. By contrast, a male on display may appear more striking or larger than he is.''

Spencer wrongly interpreted Darwin's theory with the experesssion:

''Raising a human child is a collaborative effort''  

BIOLOGY OF LOVE

By Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zollerhttp://www.lifesnaturalsolutions.com.au/documents/biology-of-love.pdf

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body 

by Steven Mithen 

Given the patriarcal political system based on money and fear that are seen throwout the world today that it might seem unlikely that the transition from primate which are mostly male and fear based politic was brought about by a female leadership based on love, communal love.  It sound crazy in our world govern by the politic of fear.  But it is what I think.  

Thanks to all posters for your excellent contributions. This is all very interesting.

Leon Batista Alberti (1404-1472), De Statua

"I believe that the arts which aim at imitating the creations of nature originated in the following way: in a tree trunk, a lump of earth, or in some other thing were accidentally discovered one day certain contours that needed only a very slight change to look strikingly like some natural object. Noticing this, people tried to see if it were not possible by addition or subtraction to complete what still was lacking for a perfect likeness. Thus by adjusting and removing outlines and planes in the way demanded by the object itself, men achieved what they wanted, and not without pleasure. From that day, man's capacity to create images grew apace until he was able to create any likeness, even when there was no vague outline in the material to aid him.”

I believe like Batista that a new level of visual art was possible beyond what Congo could achieve once one of our primate ancestor could perceived shape of familiar thing or exotic animal in ambibious stimuli like in cave wall with little lighting, or in clouds, or in the dirt.  This kind of vision is an interplay between normal vision and self-enact vision like in dreams or in our imagination.  I do not believe than any other non-human animals have this kind of visual experience.  Representation paiting or scultping or any representational art requires this type of visual imagination.

Leonardo Da Vinci encouraged the apprentice painter to make full use of this visual capacity:

"thou shouldst regard various walls which are covered with all manner of

spots, or stone of different composition. If thou hast any capacity for discovery,

thou mayest behold there things which resemble various landscapes decked with mountains, rivers, cliffs, trees, large plains, hills and valley of many sort. Thou canst t also behold all manner of battles, life-like positions of strange, unfamiliar figures, expressions of face, costumes, and numberless things which thou mayest put into good and perfect form. The experience witch regard to walls and stone of this sort is similar to that of the ringing of bells, in the strokes of which thou will find anew every name and every word that thou mayest imagine to thyself.

Do not despise this opinion of mime when I counsel thee sometimes not to

let it appear burdensome to thee to pause and look at the spots on walls, or the

ashes in the fire, or the clouds, or mud, or other such places; thou wilt make very

wonderful discoveries in them, if thou observest them rightly. For the mind of the

painter is stimulated by them to many new discoveries, be it in the composition

of battles, of animals and human beings, or in various compositions of landscapes, and of monstrous things, as devils and the like, which are calculated to bring thee honor. For through confused and undefined things the mind is awakened to new discoveries. But take heed, first, that thou understandest how to shape well all the members of the things that thou wish to represent, for instance, the limbs of living beings, as also the parts of o landscape, namely the stones, trees, and the like."

Leonardo da Vinci (1402-15l9), Book on Painting

Hi Louis,

Well you wouldn't catch me messing about with all that childish stuff! (as attached). The thing about the Chimp art is that before you can execute anything 'representative' you first have to find yourself? I think that's the kind of activity that Brassau (the chimp) was engaged in? His output is perhaps analogous to so called 'abstract art'? However artists were deliberately revisiting these states and processes that underpin perception to take a closer look? Much abstract art is analogous to dynamical systems - the process that drive perception? So Vision-Space is then back again to the image, this time with knowledge of the dynamical systems and the data formations?

David, you may be interested in a paper I co-authored on art, aesthetics, evolution and the brain that explores the role of the arts in human behaviour and how this relates to the purported interest of non-human primates in “aesthetics” (Hodgson and Verpooten 2014. The Evolutionary Significance of the Arts: Exploring the By-product Hypothesis in the Context of Ritual, Precursors, and Cultural Evolution. Biological Theory).

Although chimps may show an interest in creating basic patterns in artificial situations, they do not seem to value these for future use or build on the results. In addition, they do not seem to use the graphic outcomes to accumulate or share information. Thus, what differentiates humans is the ability to transmit, curate, and pass down graphic information so that it can be exploited.

Here are some relevant extracts from the above paper you may find of interest:

“Research in captive chimpanzees indicates they have an intrinsic motivation to draw in that the visible traces produced are self-reinforcing (Morris 1962; Tanaka et al. 2003), which is thought to be related to exploratory (search) behavior. Even at eleven months of age, chimpanzees take a spontaneous interest in drawing basic lines on an electronic finger touch screen (Tanaka et al. 2003). The fact that infant chimpanzees freely indulge in drawing suggests this is not adaptive but that pleasure is taken in stimulating existing psychosensory systems related to exploratory behavior, of which only the latter is adaptive. As chimps have not been observed making similar marks in the wild, this, again, suggests mark making exploits preexisting psychosensory systems. The fact that the intrinsic motivation to draw is not expressed in chimpanzees in their natural habitat is obviously because they do not possess a material culture that lends itself to creative drawing. The crucial difference, therefore, between human and nonhuman primates with respect to art making may not just be psychological but also sociocultural. Interestingly, chimpanzees possess enough manual dexterity to both produce and complete iconic images but are unable to succeed in this due to a lack of visual memory capacity (Saito et al. 2010). Similarly, music exploits the neural mechanisms of auditory processing (Changizi 2011), which is supported by the fact that monkeys, who are unable to produce music, respond in a consistent way to species-specific natural calls synthesized and played back as ‘‘music.’’ Moreover, they are also able to recognize tonal diatonic melodies, as opposed to the chromatic scale or atonal sounds, though this does not generalize to melodies transposed to different keys (Hauser and McDermott 2003; Snowdon and Teie 2010). As Snowdon and Teie (2010, p. 30) state, ‘‘Tamarins were generally indifferent to playbacks of human music, but responded with increased arousal to tamarin threat vocalization based music, and with decreased activity and increased calm behavior to tamarin affective vocalization based music.’’ In addition, research of (admittedly one) chimpanzee indicates a sensitivity to, and tendency for synchronous movement (tapping) in response to an auditory rhythm (Hattori et al. 2012); a finding, if corroborated, that reflects the above studies of mark making in chimpanzees. Music, therefore, seems to engage phylogenetically ancient auditory mechanisms related to the soundscape important to a species’ survival but which did not evolve for the purpose of music appreciation (Changizi 2011; De Smedt and De Cruz 2012).”

“As outlined, some monkeys, although not responding to music derived from human speech, do so to music based upon their own species-specific vocalizations (Snowdon and Teie 2010).”

“In summary, research on nonhuman primates suggests they spontaneously engage in non-adaptive art-like activities that derive from the pleasure of engaging in sensory systems that evolved for adaptive reasons, such as search behavior or species-specific calls. Although such fundamentals may seem remote from the artistic behavior of humans, they nevertheless provided a ‘‘template’’ from which complex artistic activities could be realized. The most parsimonious hypothesis, then, would be that the arts recruit primate and species-specific building blocks or precursors…”

Thank you Derek. I managed to locate and download your paper through my University's journal link. It is a good overall take on the matter, with a useful survey of recent trends and publications, and is very pertinent to this question. I agree with your conclusion.

Two videos of drawing chimpanzees and examples of drawings from Kyoto university:

http://langint.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/en/album/the_drawings_by_chimpanzees.html

In an experiment, scientists sealed food inside a log to mimic marrow locked inside long bones and then put the logs into Kanzi's enclosure. Unlike one of his companion bonobos, who managed to get the food out only by smashing the log, Kanzi used tools and spent a long time working on extracting the food.

Back in the 1990s, Kanzi was taught to shape flint into basic tools, and he used those tools and a variety of other objects to tackle the log problem. He inserted sticks into seams in the log, threw projectiles at it, and used stone flints as choppers, drills and scrapers. His companion bonobo managed to get food out of two logs. Kanzi opened up 24.

http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/alt-news/this-bonobo-handyman-makes-his-own-stone-tools.html

Louis,

I can see quite clearly in the drawings aspects of implicit and explicit awareness. Do you? Its not well formed of course but there are attempts to render something that could be analogous to the homogeneous field (peripheral vision) and the dots that are then 'understood' explicitly as line (no form from the line obviously). These are 'perception plays'? We have to find ourselves before we can set about 'representing' the world. They are not unlike my daughters drawing at age 3-4. 

I may be placing too much on this but but I don't think so. Especially if you take the context into consideration (they are close primates). If this is the case then it might just be possible to move the whole thing forwards? The best students might just respond to elementary 'life classes'! i.e. to start to organise the 'takes' on reality in one situation (1 piece of paper). The realisation of their phenomenal field - fixation.

May be can help these explorations about thinking without language, or to create from the cognitive perspective

http://www.paduan.dk/Kunsthistorie%202008/2010/Merlin%20W.%20Donald-Art%20and%20Cognitive%20Evolution.pdf

http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/2602.pdf

After downloading and reading the article Derek posted yesterday, I registered it in the working bibliography for my seminar "Art in the embodied mind," and I noticed that this was not the first of his papers that have been included in this file (I cited one of them three days ago). The others are also relevant to our discussion, so I am sharing the references here:

Helveston, Patricia A.; Hodgson, Derek, “The neuropsychology of ‘animism’: implications for understanding rock art,” Rock Art Research (Australian Rock Art Research Association/International Federation of Rock Art Organisations), vol. 27, no. 1, May 2010, pp. 61-94 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270340034_The_Neuropsychology_of_%27Animism%27_Implications_for_Understanding_Rock_Art, access: January 3, 2015).

Hodgson, Derek, “The first appearance of symmetry in the human lineage: where perception meets art,” Symmetry (MDPI AG), vol. 3, no. 1, March 2011, pp. 37-53 (http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/1/37, updated: March 1, 2011, access: January 3, 2015).

Hodgson, Derek; Helveston, Patricia A., “The emergence of the representation of animals in paleoart: insights from evolution and the cognitive, limbic and visual systems of the human brain,” Rock Art Research (Australian Rock Art Research Association/International Federation of Rock Art Organisations), vol. 23, no. 1, May 2006, pp. 3-40 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270448735_THE_EMERGENCE_OF_THE_REPRESENTATION_OF_ANIMALS_IN_PALAEOART_Insights_from_evolution_and_the_cognitive_limbic_and_visual_systems_of_the_human_brain, access: January 5, 2015).

Hodgson, Derek; Verpooten, Jan, “The evolutionary significance of the arts: exploring the by-product hypothesis in the context of ritual, precursors, and cultural evolution,” Biological Theory (Springer), vol. 10, no. 1, March 2015, pp. 73-85 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-014-0182-y, access: March 20, 2015).

Article The Neuropsychology of 'Animism': Implications for Understan...

Article The emergence of the representation of animals in palaeoart:...

Thank you, Franz. I'm looking at the texts you recommended and they seem very useful. The concept of visual thinking is fundamental. I was amazed to read on another ResearchGate question page that several members were convinced that all thinking is verbal! I suggested they think about their dreams.

Koko the gorilla (see Dr. Penny Patterson's work on her) and her partner Michael have done paintings which are on sale at their site. Some of them have aspects of representation; while most are 'abstract', there are consistencies in kinds of reference to persons and animal friends like dogs.

Thank you, Anne. I was looking at some of Koko's paintings yesterday, together with those of another gorilla named Michael. In the case of the paintings that are said to be representational, I still wonder how much of this was in the mind of the furry painter, and if some of the "representations" might be pareidolias in the minds of people eager to see reflections of the painter's visual perception in the brushstrokes of pigment.

Here is a web page with reproductions of these gorillas' paintings:

http://www.artistsezine.com/WhyGorilla.htm

Quotes from the same page include references to pictorial representation in these paintings:

"The artwork was inspired by objects familiar to the gorillas, from Michael's toy dinosaur to a red bell pepper. There's one of Michael's dog, Apple, and another of Koko's favorite bluebird. Both resemble the real things, right down to the colors."

"'It's very deliberate,' Patterson said. 'To me, it's modern art. Expressionism.' Sometimes, the gorillas would paint from a model. Other times they would draw from their imaginations, she said. Human helpers set them up with a canvas, palette of paint and brushes but left it to the apes to create as inspired."

This is very exciting, but I would feel more comfortable with it if the alternative hypotheses of coincidence and human pareidolias could be ruled out through rigorous, controlled observations. Perhaps such studies exist. Do you have any references to work along these lines, Anne (or other followers of this question)?

Another quote from the same web page is encouraging, and is the most convincing evidence I have seen on the possibility of a non-human animal creating a pictorial representation from phenomenal visual experience:

". . Not only do they draw, the gorillas communicate through sign language and understand some English. When Koko drew a pink heart, she used sign language to call it 'love.' Michael named his painting of a bouquet of flowers, Stink Pink More."

Still, the source is an E-zine that looks more like a blog. I'll keep looking!

Hi, David, thanks for your question - it's the one we always must consider, of course.

That said, I recently taught a course in which the textbook was Christine Kenneally's *The First Word," and found there so much evidence of animal communication and understanding similar to the human that I have no doubts about the capacity of the chimps for aesthetics as such.  Also, Penny Patterson has to fundraise outside the scientific community to continue her work, and I'm sure that the verbal framing of the paintings has to take that into consideration.

Certainly Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with bonobos is as rigorous and controlled as one could wish; I don't know if she's done work on aesthetics, though.

Dear Anne,

''

''Some of them have aspects of representation'' 

It is very important to test that unambigiously.  I have not seen evidences, maybe they exist, that a non-human animal can create an object , modifies a surface, modifies an object in order to represent another object that is not there, to create a symbol.  Trying to represent something through painting is a form of symbolization.  I am not aware that a non-human animal can create a symbol. What come closest to it is the adoption of a doll by a female chimp or female gorilla.  The doll serves as a substitute or symbolize the real baby.  A female gorilla in the wild that had lost her babies was seen to carry a log in the following days; maybe the log was playing the role of a baby symbol.  

''Young females of the Kanyawara chimpanzee community in Kibale National Park, Uganda, use sticks as rudimentary dolls and care for them like the group's mother chimps tend to their real offspring. The behavior, which was very rarely observed in males, has been witnessed more than a hundred times over 14 years of study.

The doll play or "stick carrying" peaked among five- to eight-year-old chimps, which are roughly equal to six- to nine-year-old humans in terms of development, according to Wrangham.''

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/101220-chimpanzees-play-nature-nurture-science-animals-evolution/

Thanks for the suggestions, Anne. After nearly a week of discussion and following up on sources provided on this thread, I don't have any doubts about the validity of the concept of non-human animal aesthetics (although this would depend on the definition of aesthetics, as some theoreticians limit the scope to humans). I would love to see some form of pictorial representation from a non-human animal, and the closest we have gotten here are the paintings by gorillas. While I remain skeptical on this point, I am hoping to find some convincing evidence.

I have always thought that we need primatology to understand ourselves, and non-human primate aesthetics can give us a deeper understanding of human aesthetics.

''Kanzi’s two-and-three-word sentences on the keyboard may seem less than impressive. But a set of experiments comparing Kanzi’s understanding of spoken English to that of Alia, the two-and-one-half-year-old daughter of a Language Center researcher appears to show a very different level of understanding. Kanzi and Alia were presented with sentence-understanding tasks as similar as the researchers could make them. Archival videotape of Kanzi’s performance sets the scene.

Kanzi sits in a room with two researchers (one is Rose Sevcik). A third (Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) stands outside the room with a microphone. The two inside researchers wear earphones playing loud music to reduce the chance they can give Kanzi any clues. The room has a “kitchen,” and a large playroom with a number of objects Kanzi has never seen. A child’s toilet, a pitcher of water, a rubber snake, a stuffed dog, a 25-pound bag of carrots, a hand puppet vaguely resembling a rabbit. The voice from outside says “Kanzi, make the dog bite the snake.” Kanzi immediately picks up the rubber snake and the plush toy dog. He carefully puts the snake’s head into the dog’s mouth and gently squeezes the dog’s jaws shut. An impressive show of understanding made more impressive by the fact that Kanzi has generalized the spoken words dog and snake to toys he’s never seen.

“Kanzi, tickle Rose with the bunny,” says Savage-Rumbaugh. Kanzi picks up a bunny hand puppet, carries it to Sevcik and tickles her. Sevcik says in explaining the videotape that Kanzi’s only previous knowledge of “bunny” was a videotape of a Language Research Center worker dressed in a bunny suit. The researchers had never drilled Kanzi (or Alia) on the requests, and all of the objects were new, purchased just for the experiment.

Duane Rumbaugh summarizes the results: “Kanzi’s comprehension of 500 novel sentences of request were very comparable to Alia’s. Both complied with the requests without assistance on about 70% of the sentences.” He emphasizes that Kanzi learned by observation alone very early in life, and further that the researchers only discovered this fact by the lucky decision to keep Kanzi around after Matata was sent home. “The apes can come to understand even the syntax of human speech at a level that compares favorably with that of a two-to-three-year-old child—if they are reared from shortly after birth in a language-structured environment. Reared in this manner, the infant ape’s brain develops in a manner that enables it to acquire language. First through its comprehension and then through its expression, a pattern that characterizes the course of language acquisition in the normal child. We had no intention of studying language-observational learning in [Kanzi]. But it happened and we’ve replicated it with other [bonobos and chimpanzees],” Rumbaugh says.''

http://acp.eugraph.com/apes/

Young children at some point draws very simple human representaions like the image below, a big circle representing both the head and the body, two circles for the eyes and two lines for the legs.  It does not require fine motor skills.  But such drawings are unambigiously representational.  I am not aware that an ape has ever draw something similar.  I would be interesting to test if such drawing could be correctly interpreted by an ape.  This type of experiments should be done with ape that have been brought up from early childhood into a rich drawing culture.  Dr. Rumbaugh had originally tried to teach language skills to Matata (Kanzi's mother) for years without any results but the story was totally different with Kanzi who was exposed from a young age to language without being formely taught.  It would be interesting to develop a visual language. A simple drawing can be done for representing:  “Kanzi, make the dog bite the snake.” Eventually the ape could learn to make requests by drawing them.

There may be some merit in looking at what a child produces prior-to his/her first face pictures? This would perhaps be the time that the child 'finds' themselves within perceptual play. Once this has occurred it would be possible to record what he/she sees in terms of the world 'out there'. Others etc. i.e. it becomes meaningful to do so.

It seems logical to me that the Chimps have yet to find themselves this being the prerequisite for presentation and representation?

If this is the case then perhaps there was a time when humans painted without realising forms? Would such work on cave walls be understood by us now or just dismissed as uninteresting? Could this painting tradition have evolved into a cultural expression without re-presentation and made it into 'our age'? Aboriginal art, Dream time and its stories?

An interesting point that needs to be borne in mind when considering the ability of non-human primates to engage in aesthetic-like behaviour is the fact that chimps are deemed to be capable of, at best level 2 perspective taking (though even this continues to be contested and level 1 may be more appropriate) whereas humans are able to deal with level 5 perspective taking  (Dunbar 2007). Perspective taking refers to the ability to see the point of view of others  i.e. escape from the tyranny of the present moment by being able to imagine past and future events that is related to theory of mind. This is thought to have evolved from the need to engage in complex social relations so that individuals can track the behaviour of others in an extended group situation.  The studies of those showing that non-human primates can achieve quite sophisticated communication, however, has to be seen against the fact that such animals are conditioned by the highly social and structured environment supplied by humans and it is probably this that allows them to go beyond their natural abilities.  Saito has shown that although chimps are able to make simple marks even when they are presented with a relatively simple task of filling a partially completed iconic drawing, they are unable to do this whereas two and half year old children succeed at the same task. This suggests although chimps are able to derive immediate gratification in producing simple marks (that is related to search behaviour) they are unable to go beyond this to produce a representational figure. As Saito et al state: “… the basic cognition and motor control required for drawing was well in chimpanzees’ capability” but the inability to produce representational drawings may be due to a “difference in the higher level cognition, such as imagining something on incomplete figures” (Saito et al (2010); See also, Saito et al 2014).  It therefore seems only humans are capable of drawing an object that is not immediately present. This may also be related to the ability of humans to engage in global processing (Saito et al 2014) through complex cross referencing of neural circuits in the higher cortex related to an enhanced visual memory capacity. This is confirmed by the fact chimps need more visual cues than humans to see illusory lines/shapes in figures such as the Kanizsa triangle. In short the enhanced cognitive abilities of humans appear to derive from the need to engage in complex social relations that facilitated the ability to produce representational depictions. 

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2007). The social brain and the cultural explosion of the human revolution. In P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, & C. Stringer (Eds.), Rethinking the human revolution (pp. 91–98). Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs.

Saito A, Hayashi M, Takeshita H et al (2010) Drawing behavior of chimpanzees and human children: the origin of representational drawing. In: Proceedings of the third international workshop on Kansei, Fukuoka, Japan, 22–23 Feb 2010

Saito et al 2014. The Origin of Representational Drawing: A Comparison of Human Children and Chimpanzee. Child Development. 85 (6): 2232–2246

Thank you Derek, for your excellent summary of chimpanzee cognition as related to aesthetic creation by making marks on sufaces. It is a superb contribution to this discussion.

John: As far I we know, the earliest coherent structured marks made by hominins on surfaces are of an abstract nature. There are geometric zigzag patterns on shells, made by Homo erectus around 500,000 before present (BP), from the site of Trinil, on the island of Java. A similar pattern, although a bit more complex, with cross-hatching and parallel border lines, can be seen on a piece of ocre from Blombos cave on the southern tip of South Africa, made by modern Homo sapiens around 77,000 BP (at the latter site there are also pigment grinding kits, with shell containers, stone grinders and pigments, as well as shell beads strung as necklaces, from ca. 100,000-70,000 BP). These creations may be seen in the articles referenced in the initial question.

The earliest non-abstract cave paintings are hand stencils, which don't really qualify as representational, since what the painters are doing is leaving a mark with a part of their bodies. Non-human primates in a human social context have done this; on the web page I referenced in an earlier post there is a gorilla hand print. Early hand stencils are those from Pettakere Cave, Leang-Leang, on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia (ca. 40,000 BP) and Cueva del Castillo, Spain (ca 37,000 BP). A representational (zoomorphic) painting from the same cave is a bit later, ca. 35,000 BP. 

A few European representational sculptures are as old as ca. 40,000-35,000 BP, which is shortly after anatomically modern humans first arrived to this region. The Chauvet Cave paintings, formally and conceptually sophisticated, are from ca. 36,000-22,000 BP. In Altamira Cave in Spain, abstract markings (ca. 39,000 BP) predate zoomorphic figures (ca. 17,000-13,000 BP). The earliest representational art that I have seen from Africa is a quartzite slab with a possible therianthrope (human-animal composite figure), from Namibia, ca. 27,500 BP.

Some of these dates could be quibbled about, but a pattern seems to emerge, where in Paleolithic visual aesthetic creation, abstraction is far older than representation, predating anatomically modern humans (we go back to ca. 200,0000-150,000 BP), and the hand stencils appear just before the first true representations. Abstraction, of course, was not abandoned but has continued throughout time and space and is still with us today.

I don't have time to put together a proper bibliography for all of this (I'm supposed to be rewriting a chapter to satisfy a couple of overzealous reviewers), but you can find an overview, with good photographs of most of the works mentioned above, in this article:

Walter, Chip, "The first artists", National Geographic (National Geographic Society), vol. 227, no. 1, January 2015, pp. 32-57.

David, its not just that basic geometric marks, which are remarkably similar over space and time, predate representational depictions but also pre-contact indigenous groups often had no representational art but nevertheless all such groups produce similar kinds of patterns. Whitney Davis refers to these as self-sufficient marks.  I proposed the "neurovisual resonance theory" based on the way the primary visual cortex acts as a filter for encoding simple lines and patterns that seems to bias mark-marking towards creating such geometrics. Below is  a couple of references that sets out this theory.  Based on this theory, and as far back as 2000, I predicted (before the Blombos finds came to prominence) we should be finding such patterns in other parts of the world long before the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, which is exactly what has happened. 

HODGSON. D. 2000. Art, Perception and Information Processing: An Evolutionary Perspective. Rock Art Research. 17 (1) pp. 3-34.

HODGSON, D. 2006. Understanding the Origins of Palaeoart: The Neurovisual Resonance Theory and Brain Functioning. Palaeoanthropology pp. 54-67 Available online at: http://www.paleoanthro.org/journal/content/PA20060054.pdf

That is very interesting, Derek. I will have a look at your articles from 2000 and 2006.

I wouldn't be surprised if some representational work (sculpture or painting) would turn up in Africa, older than ca. 45,000 BP, as an antecedent to the representational pieces from the Upper Paleolithic in Europe and other regions (other than that vaguely anthropomorphic stone from Morocco, which is intriguing but questionable as a representational creation). It is tempting to imagine a spread of representational aesthetic creation "out of Africa" with the early modern human migrations.

I like how you tie "Paleoart" with stone toolmaking in your article of 2006, Derek, and your emphasis on the aesthetic quality of symmetry in tools, in your article from 2011, cited in an earlier post of mine on this thread. Art historians have traditionally missed this part of the picture when looking at the origins of "art," due to narrow and somewhat ethnocentric definitions of "art" and "aesthetics."

Derek & David,

This is exceptionally interesting and I will now read your links in detail. Derek, you may like to look at some the the Vision-Space presentations (attached the full list - David is aware already). If the fundamental and foundational process in humans is the implicit processing system (where - dorsal) provisioning visual spatial awareness, sub-conscious by nature (to us now?) and linked to pattern and texture (not of texture in the environment, of objects and surfaces but as spatial texture leading to implicit spatial awareness) then patterning of neural firing is 'in itself' meaningful without representational content. If we are firing up/generating a perceptual structure as biological systems and we see the world 'in terms of' and 'through' this systems then getting to know it will be of huge significance - i.e. its how we become aware of ourselves, and then eventually, conscious of the world as we now understand it.

Rendering this patterning is not straight forwards! Artists adopt almost as many strategies as there have been attempts made! Spatial awareness being a diagnostic process - one way. Once realised you can't trace it back to a starting position. It's not linked to optical projection and the transcribing of pictures etc. This meaning that structure and pattern that are relevant to the process at different points are not 'represented' in the final outcome. They are 'non-pictorial'. We may well be able to 'realise' these processes, render them visible? The computational process governing the implicit system would be noise based, dynamical, non-representational, pattern forming, textural in nature, expressed within a field structure governed by an attractor and now provisioning contextual awareness. They would also facilitate multi-sense integration.

With Vision-Space (as opposed to picture space) I attempt to render the spatial field through small areas of paint that increase in size radially from fixation. It's not hard to link that to non-linear neural firing and the firing of small populations of neurones? A constantly updating mosaic of overlapping values. This system of mark making is exceptionally heavy handed and a 'blunt instrument'! I can't get close the scale of mark that actually takes place in vision of course. Also there is structure within this spatial structure that I can't get at with a brush. I try to differentiate to some extent by changing the shape of the brush mark as I get close to the designated fixation, moving to a flat brush from a round one. This helps a little with my ability to render 'edge' like information relating to the objects appearing within the field.

The point is that 90% of the painting has nothing to do with rending the world/environment. It's about rendering perceptual structure and the space it generates and through which the environment is realised. It's an ego centric system provisioning proximity cues not depth cues. Perceptual structure is generated by US! Biological systems. Without this 'understanding' there would be no means for us to understand the world (and others) in the way that we do. This has to come first. The human umwelt has to be generated before we can conceptualise about the world.

In my most recent presentation (Vision-Space: The Protagonists http://youtu.be/516mjrU3aC0) I suggest the our explicit take-on-reality (what - ventral) is likely to be an invention of mind! Mind 'called for' a detailed view of the world to enable it to better undertake the tasks it was increasingly involved in. To better support our 'intent in the world' our eyes developed lenses and adapted our processing systems to form a new pathway. This new 'conscious' process has all but taken over our 'world view' even if it still relies on the context supplied by the 'implicit' for its very existence. Implicit processing is taken for granted. Non of our instrumentation does it/performs in accordance with it as we don't 'attend' to it! It's essentially 'covert'.

Buried in the 'implicit' will lie the processes that lie at the centre of who we are and where we came from? In the painting attached the marks forming within the implicit contextual field somehow remind me of marks made by early peoples. I say 'somehow' because when I actually made a brief look I couldn't actually find any obvious links! I was especially drawn to the area of the canvas that depicts myself at the bottom. My shoulders and arms leading down to the floor. For an explanation of the painting in terms of vision (and not neuronal function) check out: Vision-Space: Self Reference Pt 4, painting phenomenal field, accessing the umwelt? http://youtu.be/g8rOhQhcl0A

Dear All,

Animals are not artists. Animals do not create artwork. What some call aesthetics of animal performances are only mind associations made by laypersons or tired professionals. Art should specifically reflect the outer world and express highly individually and innately these reflections. However, an artist is not a mirror-machine.

Andras, you will like this then?

Vision-Space: A still life painting together with mirror, mirrored

http://youtu.be/F4J579YCW-8

Dear András: These are bold statements. Have you read the previous 51 comments, the documents that have been posted or referenced, and looked at the images of creations by non-human (and pre-modern human) primates? There is a lot of interesting, cutting-edge material here. Perhaps it would be wise to directly address some of the arguments made by colleagues on this thread, before dismissing them as "laypersons or tired professionals"!

P. S. I'm voting up your answer because I respect your opinion and I am grateful to you for contributing to this discussion.

Dear András,

I disagree and here is why.  I do not have a clear idea of what being artist is because nobody has , but I have a feeling that it is central to what is being human.   But I tend to see artistry also to be central to be living because all living organisms and all that exist is part of a big creation and I will call the center of this universal creative process that has created everything and continue to do so: art.  Human are participating in life and as such are artists.  They are more artistice/creative than other non-human animals; we are less constrainted in spite of the huge pressure of conformity that living in societies implied than other non-human animals: it is both our blessing and our possible downfall.  Each of us through our own life went through all the stage of the creation of life on earth and through our enculturation process went through a significant portion of the cultural creation and in our life hope to add a drop to the continuation of  earth creation.  

  Take this paragraph as an very brief abstract on my point of view about the centrality of art and you will see that art cannot be  exclusive to human lifes.  We engage in the creation of the universe in ways that are on some aspects unique but we do so with a body that took the age of the universe to be created and so I do not expect that my way to create the universe will deviate significantly from the whole approach.

Could I ask a question of everyone? 

If contextual awareness emerges from biological noise that's been ascribed a distinct value from incoming signal we can take it that perceptual structure is essentially textural. 

To what extent does the texture of the cave wall trigger the emergence of forms? (Also think Turner and the texture from which his forms emerge) To what extent does the cave wall present a rendition of the all possibilities field from which perception emerges. Did the walls trigger the response? Were they a 'sounding board' for us?

I ask this as I have been trawling through cave paintings trying to find a depiction of the implicit field. Can't find one really! Unless it's the walls themselves. If this is the case then married up with spiral and the so-called abstract geometrical renditions some of which that could be considered close to the self-similar geometry of the 'sunflower' (attached) that's found throughout the brain then it could make sense?

Contextual implicit awareness needs to be present for the explicit awareness of form to appear within. It would need to be present for the explicit to manifest in the form of line drawings and contemplation of form. 

The issue is: is the cave wall just a blank piece of paper? Or is it a canvas - that also has an inviting texture. 

Derek's article above also makes a related point the fissures and cracks in the surface of the walls were extended into animal forms. This would be a logical next -step extension of the wall as a trigger?

John: The cave painting literature has a lot to say about the questions you are asking.

Perhaps a good place to start would be a book that addresses these questions directly, although the neuroscientific angle is not explored: Jean Clottes & David Lewis Williams, The shamans of prehistory: Trance and magic in the painted caves, translated by Sophie Hawkes, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1998. There are some points of intersection with Derek's work, although the emphasis is more on shamanic trances and cave surfaces as permeable membranes separating (and connecting) ordinary phenomenal experience and other cognitive dimensions accessed through altered states of consciousness.

If you look for images of the "Lion panel" in the Chauvet cave on the web, you will find a particularly intense play between the painted images and the rock surfaces. It looks to me like the animals are entering and exiting a rocky vagina!

Of course the photos lit with bright lamps do not recreate the mysterious flickering light of grease lamps or pine torches, nor the emergence and disappearance of rock formations and painted images, as the light sources and the viewers move through the space in the cave (perhaps analogous to fixations and saccades in everyday vision, with things constantly going in and out of our foveal-macular and peripheral vision modes).

 Thanks, I did come across some of these references but from short reviews. Must check them out properly.

David asked about further accounts of aesthetic creation in primates. If you can find a copy of the 1941 book, it is really full of interesting anecdotes including some drawing. Not an academic account, but a detailed first person account from the caregivers of this human reared gorilla.

Toto and I: A Gorilla in the Family (1941) by A. Maria Hoyt

Dear Joanne:

I couldn't find much on the web regarding the book you recommended, but I did come across an interesting journal article that discusses Toto, with information that is relevant to this thread. Here is the link:

Tanner, Joanne E.; Patterson, Francine G.; Byrne, Richard W., “The development of spontaneous gestures in zoo-living gorillas and sign-taught gorillas: fom action and location to object representation,” The Journal of Developmental Processes (Council of Human Development/Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders/Milton and Ethel harris Research Initiative), vol. 1, 2006, pp. 69-102 (http://www.psych.utah.edu/people/people/fogel/jdp/journals/1/journal1-04.pdf, access: March 23, 2015).

The references at the end include several promising titles by each of the three coauthors.

Thank you!

Just found one used copy on Amazon, $88, so it is rare. I'm the first author on that paper, forgot I discussed Toto in it!

Yes, it brought a smile to my face when I noticed your name on the paper, Joanne!

Chapter 6: Constraining Hypotheses on the

Evolution of Art and Aesthetic Appreciation*

Marcos Nadal, Miquel Capó, Enric Munar,

Gisèle Marty, and Camilo José Cela-Conde

https://neuroaestheticsnet.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/chap-6-nadal.pdf

Thank you, Louis. I have the book on top of my file cabinet in my office at present, awaiting closer attention. It's great to have the PDF file of this chapter; it makes it easier to share!

Esteemed colleagues:

I have been integrating your contributions (and some additional sources) into a working bibliography on the topics enunciated in the initial question. Some of the sources are included more for the illustrations than for the texts. Here it is:

Evolutionary aesthetics

Bednarik, Robert G.

2013 “Pleistocene paleoart of Asia,” Arts (MDPI), vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 46-76 (http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/2/2/46, updated: 19 June 2013, access: 26 July 2013).

Boly, Melanie; Seth, Anil K.; Wilke, Melanie; Ingmunson, Paul; Baars, Bernard; Laureys, Steven; Edelman, David B.; Tsuchiya, Naotsugu

2013 “Consciousness in humans and non-human animals: recent advances and future directions,” Frontiers in Psychology (Frontiers Media), vol. 4, article 625, pp. 1-20 (http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00625/abstract, access: 30 January 2015).

Chimpanzees as artists

2006 “Chimpanzees as artists,” Artists Ezine, vol. 1, no. 6 (http://www.artistsezine.com/WhyChimp.htm, access: 21 March 2015).

Deacon, Terrence W.

1998 The symbolic species, the co-evolution of language and the brain, reprint, New York/London, W. W. Norton & Company.

Drawings by the apes

sin fecha “The drawings by the apes," Chimpanzee AI, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University (http://langint.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/en/album/the_drawings_by_chimpanzees.html, access: 20 March 2015).

Gannon, Megan

2014 “Cave carving may be 1st known example of Neanderthal rock art,” en Livescience (http://www.livescience.com/47640-abstract-neanderthal-cave-engraving-discovered.html, updated: 2 September 2014, access: 20 March 2015).

Gorillas as artists

2006 “Gorillas as artists," Artists Ezine, vol. 1, no. 6 (http://www.artistsezine.com/WhyGorilla.htm, access: 21 March 2015).

Helveston, Patricia A.; Hodgson, Derek

2010 “The neuropsychology of ‘animism’: implications for understanding rock art,” Rock Art Research (Australian Rock Art Research Association/International Federation of Rock Art Organisations), vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 61-94 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270340034_The_Neuropsychology_of_%27Animism%27_Implications_for_Understanding_Rock_Art, access: 30 January 2015).

Henshilwood, Christopher S.; d’Errico, Francesco; Yates, Royden, Jacobs, Zenobia; Tribolo, Chantal; Duller, Geoff A. T.; Mercier, Norbert; Sealy, Judith C.; Valladas, Helene; Watts, Ian; Wintle, Ann G.

2002 “Emergence of modern human behavior: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa," Science (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), new series, vol. 295, no. 5558, 15 February 2002, pp. 1278-1280 (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/295/5558/1278.abstract?sid=da7c3755-b2bc-4ced-93da-2c024c50b1fd, access: 14 March 2015).

Himelfarb, Elizabeth J.

2000 “Prehistoric body paint,” Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America), vol. 53, no. 4, (http://archive.archaeology.org/0007/newsbriefs/zambia.html, access: 20 March 2015).

Hodgson, Derek

2000 “Art, perception and information processing: an evolutionary perspective,” Rock Art Research (Australian Rock Art Research Association/International Federation of Rock Art Organisations), vol. 17, no. 1, 2006 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262408071_Art_perception_and_information_processing_An_evolutionary_perspective, access: 23 March 2015).

2006 “Understanding the origins of paleoart: the neurovisual resonance theory and brain functioning," PaleoAnthropology (PaleoAnthropology Society), 2006, pp. 54-67 (http://www.paleoanthro.org/static/journal/content/PA20060054.pdf, access: 22 March 2015).

2011 “The first appearance of symmetry in the human lineage: where perception meets art," Symmetry (MDPI AG), vol. 3, no. 1, March 2011, pp. 37-53 (http://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/3/1/37, updated: 1 March 2011, access: 30 January 2015).

Hodgson, Derek; Helveston, Patricia A.

2006 “The emergence of the representation of animals in paleoart: insights from evolution and the cognitive, limbic and visual systems of the human brain,” Rock Art Research (Australian Rock Art Research Association/International Federation of Rock Art Organisations), vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 3-40 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270448735_THE_EMERGENCE_OF_THE_REPRESENTATION_OF_ANIMALS_IN_PALAEOART_Insights_from_evolution_and_the_cognitive_limbic_and_visual_systems_of_the_human_brain, access: 30 January 2015).

Hodgson, Derek; Verpooten, Jan

2015 “The evolutionary significance of the arts: exploring the by-product hypothesis in the context of ritual, precursors, and cultural evolution,” Biological Theory (Springer), vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 73-85 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-014-0182-y, access: 20 March 2015).

Isbell, Lynne A.

2011 The fruit, the tree, and the serpent; why we see so well, Cambridge/London, Harvard University Press.

Joordans, Josephine C. A.; d’Errico, Francesco; Wesselingh, Frank P.; Munro, Stephen; Vos, John de; Wallinga, Jakob; Ankjærgaard, Christina; Reimann, Tony; Wijbrans, Jan R.; Kuiper, Klaudia F.; Mücher, Herman J.; Coqueugniot, Hélène; Prié, Vincent; Joosten, Ineke; Os, Bertil van; Schulp, Anne S.; Panuel, Michel; Haas, Victoria van der; Lustenhouwer, Wim; Reijmer, John J. G.; Roebroeks, Wil

2014 “Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving,” Nature (Nature Publishing Group) (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13962.html, updated: 3 December 2014; access: 7 December 2014).

Malafouris, Lambros

2007 “Before and beyond representation: towards an enactive conception of the Paleolithic image," Image and imagination: a global prehistory of figurative representation, C. Renfrew & I. Morely, editors, Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 289-302 (http://cogprints.org/6134/, access: 30 January 2015).

Maxmen, Amy

2010 "Bowerbirds trick mates with optical illusions," Nature News (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100909/full/news.2010.458.html, updated: 9 September 2010, access: 20 March 2015).

McFarland, Richard; Roebuck, Hettie; Yan, Yin; Majolo, Bonaventura; Li, Wu; Guo, Kun

2013 “Social interactions through the eyes of macaques and humans," PLoS One (Public Library of Science), vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 1-11 (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0056437, access: 20 March 2015).

Miller, John P.; Robinson, Peter

undated “Ancient symbols in rock art: a human perspective, a human prerogative," Bradshaw Foundation (http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/ancient_symbols_in_rock_art/index.php, access: 30 January 2015).

Morriss-Kay, Gilian M.

2010 “The evolution of human artistic creativity," Journal of Anatomy (Wiley), vol. 216, no. 2, pp. 158-176 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joa.2010.216.issue-2/issuetoc, access: 30 January 2015).

Nadal, Marcos; Capó, Miquel; Munar, Enric; Marty, Gisèle; Cela-Conde, Camilo José

2009a “Constraining hypotheses on the evolution of art and aesthetic appreciation,” Neuroaesthetics, Martin Skov & Oshin Vartanian, editors, Amityville, Baywood Publishing Company, pp. 103-129.

2009b “Constraining hypotheses on the evolution of art and aesthetic appreciation,” Neuroaesthetics, Martin Skov & Oshin Vartanian, editors, Amityville, Baywood Publishing Company, pp. 103-129 (https://neuroaestheticsnet.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/chap-6-nadal.pdf, access: 23 March 2015).

Orangutans as artists

2006 “Orangutans as artists,” Artists Ezine, vol. 1, no. 6 (http://www.artistsezine.com/WhyOrangutan.htm, access: 21 March 2015).

Pettitt, Paul

2002 “When burial begins,” British Archaeology (Council for British Archaeology), no. 66 (http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba66/feat1.shtml, access: 20 March 2015).

Rosa Salva, O.; Rugani, R.; Cavazzana, A.; Regolin, L.; Vallortigara, G.

2013 “Perception of the Ebbinghaus illusion in four-day-old domestic chicks (Gallus gallus),” Animal Cognition (Springer), vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 895-906 (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-014-0821-5, updated: 10 April 2013; access: 30 January 2015).*

Saito, Aya; Hayashi, Misato; Takeshita, Hideko; Matsuzawa, Tetsuro

2014 “The origin of representational drawing: a comparison of human children and chimpanzees,” Child Development (Society for Research in Child Development), vol. 85, no. 6, pp. 2232-2246 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12319/abstract, updated: 6 November 2014, access: 15 March 2015).

Sovrano, Valeria Anna; Albertazzi, Liliana; Salva, Orsola Rosa

2014 “The Ebbinghaus illusion in a fish (Xenoteca eiseni),” Animal Cognition (Springer) (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-014-0821-5, updated: 21 November 2014; access: 30 January 2015).*

Tanner, Joanne E.; Patterson, Francine G.; Byrne, Richard W.

2006 “The development of spontaneous gestures in zoo-living gorillas and sign-taught gorillas: fom action and location to object representation,” The Journal of Developmental Processes (Council of Human Development/Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders/Milton and Ethel harris Research Initiative), vol. 1, pp. 69-102 (http://www.psych.utah.edu/people/people/fogel/jdp/journals/1/journal1-04.pdf, access: 23 March 2015).

These birds seduce

undated “These birds seduce females using interior decoration,” Viral Forest (http://www.viralforest.com/bower-bird/, access: 20 March 2015).

Zilhão, João; Angelucci, Diego E.; Badal-García, Ernestina; d’Errico, Francesco; Daniel, Floréal; Dayet, Laure; Douka, Katerina; Higham, Thomas F. G.; Martínez-Sánchez, María José; Montes-Bernárdez, Ricardo; Murcia-Mascarós, Sonia; Pérez-Sirvent, Carmen; Roldán-García, Clodoaldo; Vanhaeren, Marian; Villaverde, Valentín; Wood, Rachel; Zapata, Josefina

2009 “Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (National Academy of Sciences), vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 1023-1028 (http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1023.full, access: 20 March 2015).

Article The Neuropsychology of 'Animism': Implications for Understan...

Article Art, perception and information processing: An evolutionary ...

Article The emergence of the representation of animals in palaeoart:...

I find this Painting from Nonja the Orangutan quite remarkable.

http://www.artistsezine.com/WhyOrangutan.htm

The Rock Paintings of Williston. An interpretative study of rock art, rituals and the landscape in which they are created

by Martin K Hykkerud

Publication Date: Jun 2006

Publication Name: Master thesis

Can be download from Academia.edu

Hi David,

Nice reading list!

I've been meaning to post a reply about entoptic phenomenon as a basis for early abstract art, although I've been too busy the last few days. It appears that the Derek Hodgson article you have linked to (Understanding the Origins of Paleoart: The Neurovisual Resonance Theory and Brain Functioning) touches on this.

.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entoptic_phenomena_%28archaeology%29

.

There is a remarkable similarity in the sorts of geometric forms in rock art and megalithic art from very different cultures widely separated geographically and temporally.

These forms are  very similar to the sorts of entoptic images that may be produced by hallucinogens, or by prolonged ritual activity such as drumming, chanting, dancing, fasting etc. These images are particularly strong when you are sitting in a dark environment (around a campfire, or in a cave or a passage grave etc).

See

https://www.academia.edu/4034082/ENTOPTIC_IMAGERY_AND_MEGALITHIC_ART

The PDF is attached.

.

BTW, if you don't want to take hallucinogens or spend extended time in ritual, manual phosphene stimulation is something you can do quickly and easily that can produce short lived but essentially similar phenomenon.

http://everything2.com/title/manual+phosphene+stimulation

.

Your comments about the natural rock shapes in caves being incorporated into (and presumably inspiring) some rock art are to the point- there are many examples from Lascaux and other European sites where this is quite obvious.

Also, (re your comment  about the animals emerging from a vagina-like cleft in the rock), my partner is an archaeologist and a rock art specialist. The acronym MVOTL is short-hand for "massive vagina on the landscape" to describe rock-art sites apparently chosen due to this sort of symbolic significance.

See;

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=saZB87arFW0C&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=%22massive+vagina+on+the+landscape%22&source=bl&ots=hYazIl148t&sig=8-RFbabRKkuExlu74-_XhrC2GUc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PBIRVYfoGcG1mAXDzIKIBQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22massive%20vagina%20on%20the%20landscape%22&f=false

.

Regards,

Paul.

The painting posted by Louis. Is this essentially 'like' a rock face. Charged with 'potential'. We appear to be picking up on this, i.e. its a state of mind. The all possibilities field just marking time. A dynamical system and a biological system. If so then we can think about it requiring a phase transition to bring about an attractor. An attractor that presents conscious appreciation of the world into it. The 'ability' to see oneself in relation to the world through it. Is that a kind of out of body experience in itself? The phenomenon of vision is closer to a controlled hallucination that it is to the 'projection of optics'. So may be 'mind' was kicked into action by induced hallucination in ritual as suggested. The 'experience' induced a phase transition that stuck around, that we learned to manage? If so then that would make the caves and the paintings on them the birth place of 'mind'. 

Vision-Space is a new form of illusionary space. Its based on perceptual structure and not optical projection. It works with the data-strcutures and processes of information exchange that take place within the phenomenon of vision.

External impacts moulding us gradually through evolution must to be linked to criticality within our biology? To some extent that 'criticality' is self-organising and hence generated by the organism. To some extent we 'evolve' ourselves from within. This innate criticallity does not come 'out of the blue', it's embedded in the signals that reach us (light) and hence throughout us. It derives from that pink noise that's all around us. Its implicit.

Its why we can't be taken out of an act of observation, why vision is a relationship we form with the real. Mind provides us with the illusion of 3rd party objectivity, that it's possible to be abstracted from reality in order to view it. This 'position' is however just the result of an induced phase transition?! Our relationship with the real is reality. Hence reality occurs to us and not our instrumentation.

I would like to think that Vision-Space is capable of 'proving' this. If we can get the funding we will be able to model visual awareness that can then be evaluated and developments based on that understanding. Unfortunately this work will be deemed heretical by those that hold the funding and commission measurement by machine (by proxy), over awareness! Vision is non-photographically rendered. Vision-Space has the potential to relocate us in relation to the implicit. 

    Let me go deep into the details of the `ORIGINS` of  the so called ` geometric cross-hatched pattern` seen at Blombos Cave of South Africa  by the horn . In fact Scientific American Journal had published beautiful article 4 years ago Tittle`http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/letters-dec-10/  WHEN THE SEA SAVED HUMANITY .. In fact what we had witnessed here is the SURVIVAL STRUGGLE OF HUMANITY  helped by the MOON CYCLE of EBBS and TIDES  by exposing the vast supply of shoreline sea shells (vast Protein and Essential Mineral as well as Vitamin B12 source) absolutely needed for survival at that BOTTLE NECK . What is important here to understand is the CYCLICAL CORRELATION of  availability of  food (shell fish harvest at the shores across the Blombos Caves ) and EXPOSED SHORE LINE and the PHASES OF THE MOON (EBBS and TIDES)  ..In other words When the moon`s gravitational pull at its maximum (Aligned with Earth`s and Sun`s gravity) exposure of the Shore line is Widest and the availability of food is dramatically increased since the deepest levels of shore line  as well as larger size – quality- shell fish  is available for human collection and consumption . So correlating the CYCLICAL MOON PHASES WITH FOOD AND SURVIVAL is simple observation for humanity . BUT the story is not that simple `FOOD` related matter ONLY at all .. It has more than that : Let me go evolutionary details in other words Co-evolution with the CYCLICAL MOON LIGHT pattern  also , some of you might have heard about the 3rd eye of Lizards well without going further deep into the evolutionary details I would like to point out that the Human Epiphyseal gland Neuronal (Light stimulus)  controlled  Hormone called Melatonin also controls the Menstrual and OVULATORY CYCLE (which Means Fertility) of mature Girls and Women . Previous Anthropological observations and various research on this subject clearly points to the SYNCHRONIZATION OF OVULATIONS AS WELL AS MENSTRUAL BLEEDINGS OF FERTILE AGE WOMEN  when exposed  and slept under the Cyclical  open Moon Light environment  , particularly sleeping  under the moon light throughout the repeated cycles of moon light , moon light intensity and exposure simple synchronize the Melatonin Hormone levels through neurotropic Epiphyseal hormonal axis and in turn controls and Synchronizes the Ovulation and Menstruation in primitive Paleolithic and Neolithic  societies  . In fact we see the same Zig Zag-Geometric Cross Hatched Pattern all over the Worlds Cultures Particularly the wall paintings of Çatalhöyük excavated by late Dr.James Mellaart . These Zig-Zag patterns are the CYCLES OF THE MOON  going back to Blombos Cave 75,000 years ago . ALL WORLD  MYTHOLOGIES OF THE MOON –GODDESSES OF MOON- all related to this fundamental fact of Humanity 75,000 years ago that faithful “BOTTLE NECK” we all went through . So that so called” Geometric cross-hatched pattern”  not only related with  FOOD/MOON CYCLE/FERTILITY PATTERN but all the MYTHOLOGIES CREATED BY HUMANITY since that time . Simply because it is  closely related with OUR SURVIVAL AS A SPECIES ON THIS PLANET WITH THE MOON ABOVE ...

 Thank you 

  Dr.Metin Gunduz  March 24th, 2015      

I note that contributors have picked up on “entoptic” phenomenon as a possible explanation for the similarities in the geometric patterns that exist in palaeoart at various locations.  I take the view that, although such experiences provide clues to how the early visual cortex functions, they are unable to satisfactorily explain the widespread occurrence of geometric depictions. For example, an engraved grid pattern has recently been found in a cave in Gibraltar thought to have been made by Neanderthals around 40,000 years ago (Rodríguez-Vida et al 2014) and a shell with a chevron-like pattern has been found in Indonesia made by Homo erectus that is 500,000 years old (Joordens et al. 2015), and we find similar motifs in ethnic groups who did not indulge in using psychoactive substances to produce hallucinations or frequent places with reduced illumination such as caves. The depiction of animals in the caves of Upper Palaeolithic art also probably did not derive from hallucinatory experiences, as iconic imagery experienced in hallucinations is composed of an array of different objects but, in palaeoart, this is mostly restricted to the depiction of animals in a particular way for 30,000 years. Moreover, the animals are also depicted in a similar way in portable art and on open air rock outcrops.   If these depictions derived from hallucinatory experiences we would expect to find a much greater range of objects portrayed over this long period but this is not the case.  In a series of papers (Hodgson 2003; 2008; 2012; 2013) attempting to account for this phenomenon, I proposed a more “down to earth” approach based on the way the visual brain of hunter-gatherers interacts and is conditioned by the environmental context in which they were attempting to survive i.e., close proximity with animals on a many levels and the suggestive character of the cave environment (and the wider environment) that is full of trigger cues that suggest animal forms. This is based on the way the “normal” visual brain functions where I introduce the concept of hyperimages and seeing-in where rock surfaces provide affordances which, through embodied cognition, suggest animals in the sense that there is a dynamic interaction between the visual brain and the outside world.  In the same vein, geometric patterns are so common in world rock art because of the way the early visual cortex, which is highly sensitive to such patterns, biases perception and action towards creating such motifs through resonance (note many of the early depicted patterns occur on surfaces that already have naturally made repetitive motifs and which seem to act as an attractor on which the artificial patterns are based).  

Thanks for directing me to some of your work, John.  I agree with you that we need to take more  account of the implicit processes that occur in the visual brain that directs behaviour in ways in which we are not fully aware and, in this sense, I like the concept of an attractor that underlies this ability that is compatible with the implicit processes I refer to above.  Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that you regard the dorsal pathway as the primary way that these implicit processes occur. However, I believe that the preconscious processing of the early visual cortex also influences the higher level “what” pathway that can lead to biases in graphic outcomes.  

The ability to engage in depicting things I do not regard as leading to consciousness rather such consciousness is a symptom of our higher order associative processes that was outsourced or extended (the extended mind) to the material world that provided the possibility to think in more innovative ways, as suggested by Merlin Donald (2006).

Thanks for the orangutan painting, Louise.  Interestingly, this painting looks a little like surrogate camouflage so, again, it may arise from innately defined exploratory behaviour.  I noticed that in some of the videos showing primates engaged in painting the colours were chosen by the human supervisor, so some of these paintings are obviously scaffolded by human intervention.  John also picks up on this in stating that “The painting posted by Louis. Is this essentially 'like' a rock face. Charged with 'potential' ", which corresponds with my observations above regarding the affordances and trigger cues in palaeoart, especially cave art.

Donald, M. 2006.  Art and Cognitive Evolution. In, The Artful Mind. Oxford Univ Press.

Joordens, J.A.C.,  F. d’Errico, F. P. Wesselingh, S. Munro, J. de Vos, J. Wallinga, C. Ankjærgaard., et al. 2015. Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. Nature 518, 228-231.

Hodgson. D. 2003. Seeing the 'Unseen': Fragmented Cues and the Implicit in Palaeolithic Art. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 13 (1): 97-106.

Hodgson, D. 2008 The Visual Dynamics of Upper Palaeolithic Cav Art. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 18 (3): 341-353.

Hodgson, D. 2012. Emanations of the mind: Upper Palaeolithic art as a visual phenomenon. Time and Mind. 5 (2): 185-193.

Hodgson, D. 2013. Ambiguity, Perception, and the First Representations. In, Origins of Pictures (Papers from the Chemnitz Conference, Germany 2010). K. Sachs-Hombach and J. R. J. Schirra (eds.). Halem

Rodríguez-Vida et al 2014. A rock engraving made by Neanderthals in Gibraltar. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1411529111

Hi Derek,

So glad that you spent some time on Vision-Space. Thank you. The issue with attempting to apply vision-science to the phenomenon of vision is that the phenomenon is prior to science! The ontology is quite incorrect. As a result good deal of vision science is actually quite bizarre? The idea that we transcribe 'retinal pictures' to consciousness! There are some vision scientists such as Prof. Jan Koenderink and his colleagues that understand this and are working away at developing methodologies that can operate in accordance with the experiential ontology (experimental psychophysics etc).

So vision is in fact a controlled hallucination. We don't need drugs for that! It's all dynamical systems? All the drugs would have done in the cave is to induce an atypical phase transition within the dynamical system i.e. an artificial push! So no problem with stuff appearing before the 'push'. It was only a nudge. The system was primed and operational.

The point with respect to the early brain and the dorsal stream is that this arrangement underpins the system. It came first in evolutionary terms? The superior colliculus being very important with respect to preparing spatial information (vision and audition) for posting within the perceptual structure being generated. Note this spatial information has to be in the signal. Its not considered or conceptualised about - its unfolded. This computational process being very different to that being streamed through the retinogeniculate pathway to cortex (explicit awareness). 

This is all conjecture (to science) other than it fits with experiential reality, the study of vision as vision. Also that our attempts to code this actually result in moving images that appear to me at least, to be much closer to visual awareness than results obtained by projecting optics onto a plate. I think Vision-Space can be traced back the cave. I don't think optical projection can. Vision is non-photographically rendered and for very good reasons.

I posed this question on RG a few weeks ago.

Has the invention of the camera been biggest single roadblock to our developing understanding and the progress of knowledge?

"Has the invention of the camera been biggest single roadblock to our developing understanding and the progress of knowledge?"

Only a handful of people have looked at it and only one person responded to it. So it's not a popular position to adopt!

Thank you all for your recent posts. I'm taking this all in with great interest!

   Thanks David Charles Wright-Carr .. Then let me add one more `punch line` to my recent comment  above that you may like too  ...

   Java`s   Solo  River and the MOON`s TIDAL effect  on the river bank life of ancient men  and  the  IMPORTANCE OF MOON PHASE –OBSERVATION -   ON THE SURVIVAL OF  HOMO ERECTUS around the River bank settlements  .  Solo River ( Bengawan Solo River) is the longest river in the Indonesian island of Java, it is approximately 600 km in length . It is a renowned region in paleoanthropology circles. Many discoveries of early hominid remains have been made at several sites in its valleys,  including  the first early human fossil outside of Europe, so-called "Java Man"  skull now we known that indeed belong to  Homo Erectus .

 And famous 400,000 years old Zig Zags  on the PSEUDODON Shell presumably made by  Homo Erectus at Java island  and   SIMILARLY the  more recent 75,000 years old South African  Blombos Cave Ochre stone  carved  Zig Zags  . BOTH  undoubtedly  have  MOON CYCLE CORRELATION   -  `CONSCIOUSLY  and PURPOSEFULLY  on their so called `artistic`  CREATION`  for sure ..

(Some helpful References regarding TIDAL effect on Rivers of Indonesia are  below) 

http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/18-4_ray.pdf    Tides in the Indonesian Seas

http://www.jica.go.jp/indonesia/ku57pq00000467qf-att/River_Management_in_Indonesia.pdf  River Management in Indonesia

  Pictographs on the third story of the square tower at Cliff Palace. The left panel, located on the inside North wall, can be interpreted as a "teaching aid" demonstrating the back-and-forth motion of the rising and setting Moon along the horizon, in the course of one year. The panel on the right is located on the West wall next to the small square third story window, and can be interpreted as a tally of years between major lunar standstills (see text). Redrawn from diagrams in chapter 8 of J. McKim Malville's Prehistoric Astronomy in the Southwest.

http://www.hao.ucar.edu/education/archeoslides/slide_19.php#fig3

Science was not invented by the pre-socratic greeks, pre-historic homo sapiens were discovering and transmitting to each other the important regularities (here the cycles of the moon) of the world.  Not much remain from that period; it is amazing that scientific recording was part of it already.

John,

"Has the invention of the camera been biggest single roadblock to our developing understanding and the progress of knowledge?"

Any invention is like a finger pointing towards an aspect of the world that nobody had noticed before.  It focus our attention.  But when we focus our attention to an aspect of the visual fied, it automatically hide other aspect of the visual fied.  So all theory projects its own shadow and for a long time the aspects of the world in the shadow takes time to be discovered.  The invention of the photographic camera which is a long story of discoveries is intimatly linked to the story of our discovery how our vision work.  When the first commercially usable photographic cameras appeared in Europe it created a crisis in the european visual artistic world.  The major income of the visual artist, making realistic portrait of people for posterity was taken away by photographers.  But it was a great opportunity for the visual artists of the time to reflect onto the finality of their art.  Some of them, the impressionists came to ask the question: Is our art and an art of perfect realistic reproduction?  None of them could match the realism of the photographic machine.  The impressionists came to think of visual art as a poetry, the art of making visible what a realistic rendering hide.  They then proceed to discover all kind of new ways to render colour not by mixing paint but by juxtaposing it.  Pointillist was discovered which would later be the basis of colour tv.  Distortion of perfect perspective projection.  Simplification of form to the minimum. A huge visual exploration of the shadow of what photography was then laugh and still continue.  So I  think that it was not an obstacle but a big impetuous for visual art which also stimulated the research on vision itself. 

Louise, the problem with the camera is that it came to be used as a metaphor for how natural vision functions that led to the concept of "the innocent eye"  (Hodgson 2004) which was debunked relatively recently thanks to the Gibsonian approach to visual perception. John is correct in that vision is a dynamic process whereby the constancies that we perceive are a function of hidden processes that I would suggest were built up over evolutionary time where the neuronal hardware facilitates the algorithms for disambiguating the world.  Unlike humans, non-human primates don't seem to be able to run these algorithms at a higher level due to the fact that the dorsal "where-how" pathway has not undergone the same level of integration with the consciously derived ventral "what" pathway in SMG and angular gyrus of the parietal area (thus their inability to fill in the missing lines on a partially completed drawn object).  It seems that these pathways began to undergo greater integration with the appearance of Homo heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago at the same time that Acheulean tools were becoming more symmetrical that indicates a greater attention to shape. "Art" may therefore have derived from a raised concern for shape that occurred during this period and it is no  coincidence that a shell with intentional patterns has been found in Indonesia about the same time.

Hodgson, D. 2004. Ways of Seeing - The Innocent Eye, Individual View and Visual Realism in Art. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 11 (12): 3-16.

Well I am not sure about large sections of that! 

"The invention of the photographic camera which is a long story of discoveries is intimately linked to the story of our discovery how our vision work."

It stopped us looking (as biological systems) and we reverted to 'a proxy' relationship with reality.

It's intimately linked to the obscuration of how vision works. It seeded a massive misunderstanding. It defected us from reality and the nature of true realism. "There is nothing less real than (its) realism." Georgia O'Keeff

Yes it impressed many people and the ontology it supported of 3rd party objectivity has all but crushed out of us the relationship with the real on which we all ultimately depend. Conceptual art has replaced the discipline. Life with the realism of optical projection condemns us to a virtual existence through our instrumentation and ultimately the acceptance of paradox 'as reality'. 

Artist have fought back but the assessments of their work are now made 'in terms' of optical projection and their 'deviancy' from it. The so-called deformation in visual art actually show us flashes of perceptual structure - that is true realism. It's the camera that deviates from realism and reality. 

Vision science still uses optical stimuli and its various derivatives to feed into the visual system in experimentation? The results do not tell us much about our visual system's evolution through exposure to the environment. Neither does the exposure to other forms of artificial stimuli such as photons burnt off an element. All of this just forms a hall of mirrors scenario. We are up to our necks in it. Until the camera and optical projection are dropped as valid recording devices in relation to visual reality the nonsense will continue.

Then extrapolate. The same is true for all our measuring devices. Including CERN. Until we understand what is actually involved in us as biological systems being objective we will not understand how to develop instrumentation capable of standing in for us at remote scales. What's at stake here is our relationship to light and the nature of reality. 

John, Derek,

I agree that the invention of the camera had negative effects in the scientific investigation of vision but it is also true that it had a huge number of positive effects. We cannot describe such complex situation as either positive or negative.  Every major discovery generate both type of consequences, it speed progress in some directions but slow it down in some other that are obscure by the focus of the discovery.  The discoveries of the optic of the eyes and the extreme complexity of the visual system as it could be seen in the enlightment had a major impacts not only on the science of vision but it has shaken our confidences that our most reliable sense.  Previous to that the Aristotlean conception of vision was dominating and was based on the notion that the forms of the objects which was called images where transmits by the objects and received by the eyes and from there to the mind.  And our perception of a frog was actually the frog's form actualizing itself in our mind.  Since our vision is so good in first approximation from our visual experience in getting the forms of objects around us , the vision-cognition of Aristotle was fitting common sense.  But when we realized that the forms were not really emitted from the objects and that the optical images on the retina were projections with all kind of distorttion of the original form then most philosophers assumed that a huge gap exists in between the optical images on the retina and our visual perceptions and all kind of approaches for breaching the gap were proposed.  All of them assumed that the optical image on the retinas were very different from the actual object surfaces and assumed the poverty of the visual stimulus.  Gibson was the first visual scientists who assumed that the visual stimulus was so rich in visual informtion and he came up with a realist vision theory where vision was about the detection of invariants in the dynamic optical array.  Gibson was a very intuitive psychologists and he point the way to a lot of invariants which were later confirmed by computer vision people and later experimental psychologists with modern digital images and computer tools and algorithms.  Gibson as well as the Gestaltists and Konderink and many others had led me to an geometrical image analysis approach which has many feathure of the old Aristotlean notion of the object's form actualizing.  Of course, there is no form traveling in space but the optical image surface that is projected on the retina is like a topographical surface and this surface has a differential geometry defined by the differential geometry of the object's surface. An optimal approach for analysis this geometry is to optimally eliminate it through space and time Guaussian filtering as defined by Koenderink.  If you conceive of the optical image surface as being created by the inverse of this optimal elimination of its geometry, you end up with a form generative process that is a kind of form actualization.  What is amazing in this form actualization is that it correspond to the actual growth of the object's forms like in the Aristotle philosophy which came from his biological observations of embryo developments.

In cave surfaces, they are crease in the surfaces.  Since crease structures are the fundamental differential geometrical aspect of images which are mostly conserved by the imaging process, it thus speculate that they would good trigger for self-enact crease structure schemata in the visual system.  Marking of lines or dots are crease structures corresponding to the fundamental crease structure schemata of the visual system.  The perception of constellation of stars correspond to crease structures as well.  All the most basic geometrical forms: circle, line, square, triangle do correspond to the most basic crease structure schemata.  Almost all the visual form end up to these when fully degenerated. And when inversly viewed, all visual forms are initially one of these in their initial generation and so evolutionary descended from one of these.  All the crease structure form a huge philogenic tree and visual perception ascend the nodes of this tree: visual awareness proceed from the root to the leafes.  Visual imagination is a self-enact visual awareness.  And here John, imagination and vision are not totally separated since visual awareness is both self-enact and stimulus enacted.  Both influenced each other. The primate human transition is about the conscious access to the self-enactment.  The self-enactment part, not only of vision but of all cross-modal integration of the senses have evolved tremendiously in mammalian brain evolution but conscious self-enactment seem to be key transition.  Simple line drawing are so evocative for our children and not at all for primates.  We imagine so easily monstrous figures from cave walls in low illumination because of this conscious self-enactment. ''greater attention to shape'', it derives from this conscious self-enactment.  From then on the Michelangello of this world could see the statue inside the block of marble ready to be liberated.  Bilateral symmetry crease axis are the most conscpicious crease structures.  It was the search of how to detect such structure that attractedmy attention to creases in the first place. Dreaming is learning from self-enactment from short term memory traces of the activation of the schemata.  Schizophreny is the breaking in this control from self-enact and enact awareness.  Shamanism is the playing through all kind of activities of this key mechanism of balance between the enact and the self-enact.  End of Louis Brassard Vison 101 crash course.

Video of a Bonobo that is painting at the Amsterdam zoo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8O9vuH3wB4

The video show Terbang (a bonobo) drawing with colour crayon;  he seems to be enjoying the activity like a 2 or 3 year old child.  He can draw like this for hours without paying the slightest attention to what is going on around him.

 Professor Kortland :

 1. Apes, just like yong children, do not draw from obligation but from pleasure.

2.  Ape will never draw outside the limits of the sheet of paper.

3.  A primate’s artistic sense is like that of a child aged 2 or 3.

re Cameras vs Eyes;

We all experience reality as though our eyes are cameras producing a representative image in our head, (ie: as though they are simply windows which allow us to observe the external world objectively), but as several contributors have mentioned above, this is an illusion.

Light bounces off objects in the world, and some of that light enters our eyes and impacts upon our retinas, stimulating electrical signals to the visual cortex. Our brain then interprets these signals and gives them meaning. It is this last part of the process that allows children to recognise a line drawing as representing something real, or the sculptor to see the finished work of art in the raw material- (thanks for that point Louis).

The most famous example is that we can all see faces in any natural or marked surface that has two dots and a line, or two dots in a roughly face-shaped frame.

:)

Even neonates preferentially track such shapes;

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027791900456

.

The human brain tends to pay a great deal of attention to a small portion in the centre of our visual field, and then fills in the blanks from memory and expectation. This last part of process is very significant, although most of the time we are blissfully unaware that it is happening. It means sometimes we don't see something that is right in front of us, because we are situation-ally inattentive and the thing is something we wouldn't normally expect to see in that context...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/but-did-you-see-the-gorilla-the-problem-with-inattentional-blindness-17339778/?no-ist

.

On a related note, we are pattern-discovering machines, and our brains have evolved to be very sensitive to detecting a signal in the sensory noise that is the world. However this means sometimes we "see" or "hear" things that objectively are not there.

On several occasions whilst spending several days alone in the bush, I have experienced an auditory mis-perception where the babbling of a stream flowing over rocks or a similar source of background white-noise begins to sound like indistinct voices murmuring  just within earshot. My under-stimulated brain was desperately trying to find a signal (or "meaning") in random noise.

Visual mis-perceptions and frank hallucinations can arise in a similar way, and I suspect this process underlies the suggestions above that some abstract and representational art arose as a response to patterns or shapes perceived in the natural surfaces the art is incised or painted upon.  As Louis says, we are capable of seeing the "statue in the block of marble". These sorts of phenomenon can be induced by hallucinogens but also by a variety of ritual activities or unusual mental states, (chanting, drumming, dance, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, fasting etc).

So, would humans make art if our perception really was veridical?

See Donald Hoffman's comments (below) on why our perception is not veridical...

Paul,

Quote from Gestalts as ecological templates

Jan Koenderink

http://gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/oxford/Koenderink-Gestalts_as_ecological_templates.pdf

A good way to summarize the above account is to say that human visual awareness is an “optical user interface” (Hoffman 2008, 2009). This implies many things, several of great conceptual importance. I’ll discuss only a few. Consider the implications of visual awareness being a “user interface”. A user interface is a system designed to:

- both disconnect the user from the world, and to re-connect the user to a subset of the world. The re-connection fully re-defines the natural causal interactions between the agent and the world;

- screen the user from complexities of the world that the user does not “need to know”. Thus, the interface is by its very design non-veridical;

- enable simple and efficacious interaction with the world in terms of the interface.

Thus the user ends up interacting with the interface, rather than the world per se. The world is

“summarized” in the interface in a way that promotes efficacious actions, rather than understanding. This is definitely to the advantage of the user. It optimizes “fitness” in the evolutionary sense, at the expense of

veridicality. What the user doesn’t need to know, the user will never know: the interface is there to make sure of that.

Perhaps the best known example is the “desktop” paradigm of laptop computers *36+. Consider the process of deleting a text file. The text file “is” an icon on the desktop. You use the mouse to “drag it” to the “trash”,

which is another icon on the desktop. As you place the text file on top of the trash, it magically disappears.

What really happened? That depends. To the interface programmer you moved the mouse, thus defining a

sequence of screen locations. The program writes the empty desktop over the text file icon, then writes the

text file icon in its new location over the desktop. This process is terminated once the mouse is over the

trash. The text file icon is not redrawn, instead a message is send to the file manager. The file manager is

another program. It manages nested lists of files. It deletes the text file from the list. This deletion generates

a signal to the “system” (another program) that “frees” the space on the disk (or somewhere else) where

the text file was stored. Nothing happened to the text file (a hacker may still “retrieve it”). Only a reference

was deleted and the desktop picture changed. The systems programmer has another story. The electronics

engineer another story still. The chips technician has yet another story, and so forth. The user doesn’t have

to know, nor does the user want to know. The fact that the text file icon suddenly disappeared was

encouraging (the “text file disappeared in the trash”). Are text files like such icons? No way! The text file is

different things to different people. Fortunately, the user doesn’t need to know.

It is actually a good thing not to know what goes on in the physical environment you find yourself in. You

don’t want to be a systems programmer, an electronic technician, a chip specialist, a solid state physicist, a

quantum mechanics expert, …, just to delete a text file! Moreover, you don’t want to know what is inside

the box you call “computer” (vacuum tubes, transistors, silicon chips, sawdust, empty beer cans, or what

have you). Thus desktop interfaces are good. Everybody agrees on that. The surprising thing is that people

somehow hesitate when talking about perception and the physical world. Most contemporary philosophers

consider it problematic that we do not have the kind of awareness that might be designated “veridical”.

(Strange enough, it is usually silently understood that we all know what might be meant by “veridical”. Does

it include string theory *37+? This is the God’s Eye View again.)

It never ceases to amaze me that the human brain with more than a handful of neurones, can be so fascinated if not fooled by the output of an inanimate device that has none and then create/produce mountains of media, virtual environments, stimuli, research, papers, articles, conceptual models of the visual system and even the universe, on the basis that its output is analogues with human perception and somehow more 'real' than visual experience. All of this when at the same time filling national galleries with the works of visual artists that clearly demonstrate the massive differential. In fact the work of the entire discipline that actually deals with the issues 1st hand is dismissed as being 'subjective'. Shuffling the analogy off onto a computer is not going to sort the situation? We must understand that data structures and processes of information exchange that take place within the phenomenon of vision. A good place to start will be with the subjective study of the phenomenon that occurs to us by those that take the time to explore it and then maybe the efforts of the first painters in the universe? The 2 things that need to be left at the door are the camera and 90% of vision science.

The aesthetic ape

The Sciences

Volume 12, Issue 2, Article first published online: 31 JUL 2013

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2326-1951.1972.tb00971.x/abstract

Picture perception in primates: the case of face perception.

Pascalis, O.1, Petit, O.2, Kim, J.H.3 & Campbell, R.

Here is another recent take on evolutionary aesthetics (sorry, it's not open access):

Consoli, Gianluca, “The emergence of the modern mind: an evolutionary perspective on aesthetic experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (The American Society for Aesthetics), vol. 72, no. 1, winter 2014, pp. 37-55 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.www.e-revistas.ugto.mx/doi/10.1111/jaac.12059/abstract, access: 25 march 2015).

This one is online:

A Cognitive Theory of the Aesthetic Experience

Gianluca Consoli

Volume 10, 2012

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/ca/7523862.0010.006/--cognitive-theory-of-the-aesthetic-experience?rgn=main;view=fulltext

Small essay on Aesthetic and the evolution of the theatrical animal:

The expression ''visual perception'' is misleading by sudgesting a that visual perception is an input to cognition. Visual perception is always integrated into a whole activity and the whole activity determine what will be attended in the world, the focus of the attention.  We have to avoid the simplistic model of a loop of the organism with the world where perception is from the world to the organism.  We have to see the whole activity of the organism as an interaction with the world.  The word ''interaction'' is more appropriated than ''adaptation'', a word that is privileged by the evolutionary perspective.  ''interaction'' sudgest that the organism react to the word and act on the world.  It is both adaptive and niche building.  The organism not only adapt to the word but transform the word.  All the perceptual systems interact with each other at the same time as interacting with different perspective on the world.  They do not do it independently.  The most important aspect of the interaction with the world is where the organism is learning.  The aesthetic experience is the feeling of learning.  It is a feeling that promote learning and the learning promote the feeling.  Learning is the adding up to new schemata, schema of action.  It is not done in a vacuum but it is completing already existing mode of action.  It is a construction of the organism interacting interface, a continuation of the organism growth.  In the artistic experience, the word is both perceived and transform and the transformation is done in a way that promote the construction of new mode of interaction.  An artwork is not the real product of art, it is simply the mean to construct the artist.  But it is also a world building because the perception of the artwork require the contruction of the same type of perceptual interfaces in those that seek to engage with the artwork allowing them to create part of the world.  An architect invent a new style which is bizar at first but with the year propages and meets other styles which fuse in some other architech and so it goes.  Humans are much more niche builder than adaptive animals.  Niche building is culture building and culture building is cognitive interface building.  Human have this cognitive interface building capacity because it has access to the core of the interface interaction in a different way than our animal ancestor.  I call this core the self-enactment room.  It is a room that was built in evolution but could only be access subconsciously.  This room has the core narrative of behavior.  It is an acting school.  Other animal just goes to this school to learn one persona in their youth and act it the remaining of their life.  Only human can stay in the acting school and learn all kind of persona, character because we have access to the core mammalian narrative through a conscious pathway making us a full fledge theatrical animal, a total shapeshifter and so can build culture and the word from the core narratives built up by life.

As ever Louis you are thinking around the real issues.

"We have to avoid the simplistic model of a loop of the organism with the world where perception is from the world to the organism.  We have to see the whole activity of the organism as an interaction with the world."

This is essentially the phenomenological model? If so, I think it needs adapting slightly. 

We are born to this estate! We are primed. Before we open our eyes or brain has been calibrated by retinal waves. Its fired up. Waiting upon etc. That is evolution's slice and it's a hell of a slice. So perceptual structure is operational in its most rudimentary form before the world/environment is encountered. Only then can the interaction begin with respect to this new life form and its encounters with the environment.

We then need 13-16 years developing the system through exposure to the environment (adult perceptual awareness) before it fully matures. The so called "critical period".

An artist can develop an awareness of this process. It's possible to watch oneself in the process or activity of looking. We can develop neuronal processes that enable us to monitor what's going on. And 'no' its not simple to undertake and no one pays you for your trouble. No one these days even bothers to look at what's being produced because they all have cameras!

John,

We are all in an immense almost unexplored forest and each of us has travelled along a few paths and have climbed a few peak in the hope to see more of it and then we tell stories of the forests to each other.  Should we expect that we will come up with the same stories given the little explorationatory stories each of us has lived.  Obviously not but this is why all the stories are so precious.  We have observed even some common corners but always from different perspectives.  Your last post is not in my eyes in conflict with my narrative. We should be working in meshing narratives when it is possible.  The new life form will cover hundred of million of years of biological structural evolution within the first month of development.  It is not a manufacturing process like the building of a plane and then we swith the power on and we fly it.  All along the organism is living its life and active in its development and so from the first second of conception life begin.

The Biological Roots of Aesthetics and Art

Bernd Heinrich, Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA. Email:[email protected].

http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP11743761.pdf

Evolutionary Psychology

www.epjournal.net – 2013. 11(3): 743-761

Abstract: Animals’ choice behavior is driven by motivation that is attributable to both innate urges and from positive and negative reinforcements. Using a comparative approach as well as experimental evidence, I explore how the first involves fitness-enhancing benefits from aesthetics that are derived from ancestral choices via natural selection. Innate urges and aesthetics help guide animals to produce appropriate positive and negative choices that are species-specific. Choices of food, habitat and mates or associates are considered. I propose that ART IS NOT A UNIQUELY HUMAN PRODUCT, BUT A REPRESENTATION OR AN EXTENSION OF THE MAKER AS ARE THE ORNAMENTS, DISPLAYS, AND SONGS OF A BIRD. 

The Biology of Aesthetic,

Maura C. Flannery

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4449723?sid=21105779205481&uid=3739400&uid=2&uid=3737720&uid=4

Goethe and the Molecular Aesthetic

Maura C. Flannery

Abstract: I argue here that Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” is not an alternative approach to science, but an approach that scientists use consistently, though they usually do not label it as such. I further contend that Goethe’s views are relevant to today’s science, specifically to work on the structure of macromolecules such as proteins. Using the work of Agnes Arber, a botanist and philosopher of science, I will show how her writings help to relate Goethe’s work to present-day issues of cognition and perception.

http://www.janushead.org/8-1/flannery.pdf

Biology & Art: An Intricate Relationship

Flannery, Maura C.

https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-282821868/biology-art-an-intricate-relationship

Kingdon describes in detail, and with the aid of many illustrations, how he used drawing as a way to observe these mammals closely and to correlate behavior with anatomy. He argues that photography couldn't do the job: it didn't force him to observe but did the work of looking for him, and in an inferior way. In addition, he makes a more novel argument: that a camera doesn't see in the way a human does and so doesn't create the kind of image that is most familiar to the human mind. A camera processes all points of light in the same manner, whereas the brain finds edges and creates constructions that are based on past experience. Kingdon continues: "If the brain is unlike a camera in actively seeking outlines, there is the strong implication that 'outline drawings' can represent, in themselves, artifacts that may correspond more closely with what the brain seeks than the charts of light-fall that photographs represent" (Canfield, 2011, p. 139). This is an interesting argument for drawing as an adjunct to photos if not a substitute for them. Kingdon's essay is filled with wonderful sketches to illustrate how he used art to learn about African mammals. These studies resulted in several major contributions to the zoological literature, because along the way Kingdon learned a great deal about the biology of these animals. His art and science really do create a "seamless whole," to use an overworked term that I dislike, but in this case it's definitely apt.

This is a contribution to the debate that the visual brain does not function like a camera - a statement from my paper "Ways of seeing: The innocent eye, individual view and visual realism in art" (2004) mentioned above:

Here, I suggest, there is no pre-formed image that is presented to the later stages of the visual brain for further analysis. What may exist at these earlier levels is a set of algorithms, which are a function of the way the neural system is arranged to deal with incoming information. These algorithms are not in themselves images but rather rules implicit in the way neurones fire relative to one another so that they are able to encode incoming information efficiently and reliably (for more on this see below). Beyond this early stage of processing further analysis deals with larger chunks of information. This stage is characterised by those evolutionarily-mediated affordances integral to the visual system that have enabled rapid, efficient disambiguation of the world; more specifically, where information is sufficiently 'labelled' so that it can be recognised quickly and economically thereby leading to constancy for form. This I will refer to as the 'expeditious eye', (or usual/typical view as realised by recourse to what I term 'first-order neurones') because it is a preliminary, yet essential, capacity that promotes survival in an uncertain environment.

Thanks Derek,

This description kind of fits with my understanding with respect to the diagnostic -one way development of cues segmented from the chaotic stream of light input. A lot of this was developed when talking to Prof Jan Koenderink and Dr. Andrea van Doorn who contributed to and who's work directly impacted on the development of Vision-Space.

You description stops short of the position where Vision-Space appears to require there to be a generated ego-centric perceptual space within which the cues are then manifested? I think this is absolutely critical.

In Vision-Space there is only ever 'one' space (for all) sensory input to be realised. Its radial and set-out from fixation. No matter where you look or to way sound you attend to it all takes place within this structure. A field structure. There are obviously multiple advantages to such an arrangement. Too obvious to list really. In fact I can't begin to think about how the brain would cope without such an arrangement? 

If this is the case, we can start to understand the perceptual issue that would arise for individuals who for what ever reason, are unable to fire it up and/or prepare the cues in the way required to populate it.

The issue for science is that it will never get to the realisation by studying neural firing and presenting the visual system with stimuli that stand no chance of propagating the cues as they simply don't contain the information! Perceptual structure must be properly charted in order that we can develop the appropriate means to test it. This is the 'ontology' issue.

What we need to develop is a programming architecture for Vision-Space that incorporates all the insights that good people like yourself have. It has to have cross disciplinary relevance to ensure that its comprehensive and therefor useful for the contributing disciplines to use, test and feedback new insights. Open source code etc.

If we can do this then we can 'get beyond' the wretched camera and break the artificial ceiling its imposed on our understanding? That hall of mirrors is well over due for a sledgehammer!

The "ego-centric perceptual space" that John mentioned has been discussed in some detail by Arnold Trehub. His work can be dowloaded from his ResearchGate profile. For a summary, see his article "Where Am I? Redux".

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arnold_Trehub

We may seem to be traveling far from the original question, but I think exploring this bedrock of experience is a worthwhile journey.  I am learning a great deal and really enjoying the posts of all contributors. I hope others feel the same.

David, this sort of thing often seems to develop from RG Questions you post-  and I hope you realise it is deeply appreciated.

Respect and regards to you all,

Paul.

Thank you, Paul.

You're right, we've definitely strayed from the "non-Homo sapiens primate" course!

But it has been interesting, as you note.

Louis, This is interesting

I haven't finished it yet but the awareness of a covert process at play in scientific enquiry, something that can't find articulation, is fascinating. While we fiddle about with the explicit we are subconsciously aware (or should be) of where the context fits around it. 

This is essentially how VS operates, with the modulation of data in central vision leading to the contemplation of objective form sitting within contextual spatial awareness. If VS is correct then it's influence and the relationships should turn up everywhere? Or if you prefer, all the observations that have been already made on this subject should find a home in the VS architecture?

It's the computational process involved in the implicit that going to be significant. VS gives us an 'illustration' of the outcome of this processing. We also know that it has to be highly efficient and can link this to the dorsal stream and with retinocollicular linkages with respect to vision. That should allow us to identify the processes that govern it and hence how to generate it?

To bring the discussion back to non-human primate “art”, it may that when humans praise primate graphic productions as aesthetic this may be a case of anthropomorphosis (the recognition of human characteristics in things). For example, Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner found that experts, when assessing aesthetic quality, could reliably discriminate or prefer abstract expressionist paintings produced by experienced artists compared to those produced by infants (and by implication non-human primates).  See:  https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/.../articles/mind_behind_art.pdf

In this respect, the development of an aesthetic sense appears to develop relatively late on beginning at 7 years and often not until they 12 years of age, and the development of this ability is piecemeal in that aesthetic awareness in one medium does not seem to transfer to another.

(Winner et al 2011. Children's perception of ‘aesthetic’ properties of the arts: Domain-specific or pan-artistic?)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-835X.1986.tb01006.x/abstract

Hi Derek,

I tend to agree, although, (re: age and development of a "sense of aesthetics"),  I must point out that;

• There is great inter-individual variation within human children in this regard, 

and

• Nonhuman primates mature physically, mentally, (and perhaps aesthetically) at a much earlier age than humans.