Asinan
Luis Miguel Martínez Otero (organizador)
Resumo
The premise of the XSCAPE Project on Material Minds (ERC-2020-SyG 951631) is that materiality (including artefacts, but also constructions or landscapes), and humans’ active engagement with them, alters and transforms thinking and patterns of attention.The project sheds new light on the ways in which materiality affects cognition and on the different time scales and historical and social conditions in which this occurs. This claim requires experimental demonstration by rigorous analysis (eye-tracking techniques in controlled environments, combined with other methodologies). Our aim is to test this and ‘close the loop’ by showing that material culture does not simply reflect, but actively alters modes of thinking, attending, and reasoning. The alternative view we apply proposes an ordered means of linking perception, attention and behaviour with cognitive change and learning.Preliminary results strengthen our confidence to confirm this hypothesis, and with this contribution we intend to share them and to introduce our new laboratory and methodologies.