Children, Metaphorical Thinking and Upper Paleolithic Visual Cultures

Bibliographic Data

ID18972782
AuthorsA Nowell (0000-0002-1103-2919, University of Victoria, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume8
Issue2
Pages122-132
Publication date2015-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueChildhood in the Past (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1758-5716 • E-ISSN: 2040-8528
PublisherManey Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1758571615z.00000000034
OpenAlexW1925468349
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited30

Many children growing up during the Upper Paleolithic lived within rich pictorial cultures. This article explores how these children might have employed metaphorical thinking in the production and decoding of this imagery. Metaphors are said to act as a bridge between different realities, different levels of meaning and different realms of experience. Humans use metaphorical thinking to recognize patterns and create relationships between disparate elements and to imbue these patterns and relationships with meaning. As young children begin to verbalize and engage in fantasy play, they also begin to spontaneously produce metaphors. Through fantasy play, children employ metaphorical thinking to rearrange disparate thoughts, ideas, objects and forms of expression into novel combinations. As they develop both cognitively and socially and their knowledge of their world expands, children's capacity to generate and understand metaphors similarly expands. Adults continue to use metaphorical thinking to comprehend and communicate their realities and to transform the world around them. It is perhaps not surprising that metaphorical thinking is implicated in many examples of Upper Paleolithic art. If adults produced the majority of these images, it is likely the experiences they garnered in childhood and their expanding competency with metaphorical thinking that allowed them to do so

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Fantasy · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Upper Paleolithic · Visual thinking · Categorization, perception, and language · Computer Science · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy · Psychology