Aesthetic appreciation is more than seeing, and symbolicity is more than discriminating: a comment on Tylén et al. (2020)

This article provides a brief critique on a recent study [Tylén, K. et al. (2020): The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117(9), 1578-1584. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1910880117] on whether early human engravings became more aesthetic, more culturally identifiable and more symbolic over time. We argue that some of the experimental designs in the target article does not match well with the corresponding hypothesis. Future research on the cognitive and neural basis of human art and language evolution should pay more attention on the effect of topological features (“hole-features”) on visual perception, implicit processing in aesthetic appreciation, and the complementarity of generalization and discrimination in the processing of symbolic systems.