Criado Boado, FelipeAlonso Pablos, DiegoBlanco Rial, Manuel JoséPorto Tenreiro, YolandaRodríguez Paz, AnxoCabrejas, ElenaBarrio Álvarez, Elena delMartínez, Luis M.2020-04-022020-04-022019Criado-Boado, F., Alonso-Pablos, D., Blanco, M.J. et al. Coevolution of visual behaviour, the material world and social complexity, depicted by the eye-tracking of archaeological objects in humans. Sci Rep 9, 3985 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-39661-whttp://hdl.handle.net/10347/21111We live in a cluttered visual world that is overfowing with information, the continuous processing of which would be a truly daunting task. Nevertheless, our brains have evolved to select which part of a visual scene is to be prioritized and analysed in detail, and which parts can be discarded or analysed at a later stage. This selection is in part determined by the visual stimuli themselves, and is known as “selective attention”, which, in turn, determines how we explore and interact with our environment, including the distinct human artefacts produced in diferent socio-cultural contexts. Here we hypothesize that visual responses and material objects should therefore co-evolve to refect changes in social complexity and culture throughout history. Using eye-tracking, we analysed the eye scan paths in response to prehistoric pottery ranging from the Neolithic through to the Iron Age (ca 6000–2000 BP), fnding that each ceramic style caused a particular pattern of visual exploration. Horizontal movements become dominant in earlier periods, while vertical movements are more frequent in later periods that were marked by greater social complexity.eng© Te Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/journal article10.1038/s41598-019-39661-w2045-2322open access