Upper Palaeolithic art as a perceptual search for magical images

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