Seeing the ‘Unseen’: Fragmented Cues and the Implicit in Palaeolithic Art

Abstract

Palaeolithic Art is generally thought to be based primarily upon the explicit conscious aspects of recognition and memory. Recent research into perception and cognition, however, has revealed a ‘hidden’ substructure of processing, known as implicit perception and memory, that functions in a different way to overt modes of cognisance but, yet, by dovetailing with consciously defined determinants helps to define how these are structured. As the making of Palaeolithic Art would have been contingent on the perceptual/recognition/visual memory system, it is therefore admirably suited to an understanding from the standpoint of implicit processes. Here I will demonstrate how the enduring features of this art can be investigated from the perspective of implicit, or covert, psychological factors and the consequences of this approach for the genesis of this art.