Exploring the Emergence of Organized Colouration in Paintings Through Cultural Transmission

Painting and drawing are symbolic representations that visually transform natural scenes into line and colour expressions. These artworks undergo a series of modifications when transmitted between individuals/communities, known as cultural transmission. The dynamics of cultural transmissions has been investigated experimentally, revealing structured linguistic and musical expressions as their outcomes. Cultural transmissions have also been modelled mathematically, proving a strong influence from a prior knowledge of transmitters. Here, we investigate an emergence of structured colour expression in painting via cultural transmission. We experimentally transmitted colouring books, wherein the participants memorised and reproduced the colour patterns of the book they saw; then, their response was presented as the memorization target for other participants. We expected the outcome of these transmissions represents the prior knowledge about the colour perception of the objects of the colouring books. Our results revealed a certain type of structuring in the last generation of the transmissions, indicated by the consistent use of fewer colours for recognizable segments/objects, compared to the random patterns in the first generation. However, naturalistic colour patterns (e.g. green for leaves) were observed only in some of the transmission chains. These results suggest that, like language and music, colour representations become structured during cultural transmission.