Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The European Upper Palaeolithic is rich in figurative cave art. In particular, prey animals are often depicted in simple sche- matic outlines. The role and function of these depictions is sub- ject of controversy with competing accounts represented in the literature. Here we apply eye-tracking to investigate partici- pants' distribution of visual attention as a function of three hy- pothesized pragmatic functions of the cave art: aesthetic appre- ciation, narratives about animal behavior, and social learning of animal species. Results indicate vast variability in visual ex- ploration patterns across the viewing conditions, with more uniformly distributed attention in the aesthetics condition, more focus on legs and torso in the behavior condition, and more attention to the head regions in the species recognition condition. Findings are discussed in regards to the under- and over-specification of information in the animal paintings as a cue to their possible past function.