Perceptual grouping explains constellations across cultures

Psychological Science, 2022

Cultures around the world organize stars into constellations, or asterisms, and these groupings are often considered to be arbitrary and culture specific. Yet there are striking similarities in asterisms across cultures, and groupings such as Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades, and the Southern Cross are widely recognized across many different cultures. Psychologists have informally suggested that these shared patterns are explained by Gestalt laws of grouping, but there have been no systematic attempts to catalog asterisms that recur across cultures or to explain the perceptual basis of these groupings. Here, we compiled data from 27 cultures around the world and found that a simple computational model of perceptual grouping accounts for many of the recurring cross-cultural asterisms. Our results suggest that basic perceptual principles account for more of the structure of asterisms across cultures than previously acknowledged and highlight ways in which specific cultures depart f...

Nature Astronomy, Vol. 6, pp. 406–409., 2022

Here we discuss the different ways in which stars have been organized into groups and in which these groups have been endowed with meaning. Psychologists have studied how the human perceptual system organizes simple visual elements such as dots or contour fragments into groups, and within this literature constellation formation is often invoked as an example of perceptual grouping. To a good first approximation, the human visual system is invariant across cultures and therefore offers up similar candidate star groups to any two people observing the same region of the night sky. Given this foundation, culture then shapes which groups attract the shared attention of a community and the ways in which these groups are embedded in systems of stories.

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Vol. 45, pp. 880-887, 2023

Many cultures share common constellations and common narratives about the stars in the night sky. Previous research has shown that this overlap in asterisms, minimal star groupings inside constellations, is clearly present across 22 distinct culture groups and can be explained in part by properties of individual stars (brightness) and properties of pairs of stars (proximity) (Kemp, Hamacher, Little and Cropper, 2022). The same work, however, found no evidence that properties of triples (angle) and quadruples (good continuation) predicted constellation formation. We developed a behavioural experiment to explore how individuals form constellations under conditions that reduce cultural learning. We found that participants independently selected and connected similar stars, and that their responses were predicted by two properties of triples (angle and even spacing) in addition to the properties of brightness and proximity supported by previous work. Our findings lend further evidence to the theory that commonality of constellations across cultures is not a result of shared human history but rather stems from shared human nature.

The analysis described here attempts to estimate the range within which we use our tendency to see a familiar shape in a disordered pattern (Pareidolia). The study starts with the proof that the stars visible to the naked eye are arranged following a Poisson distribution, a concept that I use to understand why, in the works of several artists, the stars appear so clustered that they form an excess in the number of possible constellations. This analysis should be considered only preliminary and will be completed soon by further investigation which I describe at the end of this paper.

The development of the 48 Greek constellations is analyzed as a complex mixture of cognitive layers deriving from different cultural traditions and dating back to different epochs. The analysis begins with a discussion of the zodiacal constellations, goes on to discuss the stellar lore in Homer and Hesiod, and then examines several theories concerning the origins of the southern non-zodiacal constellations. It concludes with a commentary concerning the age and possible cultural significance of stars of the Great Bear constellation in light of ethnohistorical documentation, folklore, and beliefs related to European bear ceremonialism.

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, Vol. 23(2), pp. 390‒404, 2020

Cultures around the world find meaning in the shapes of stars and features in the Milky Way. The striking appearance of our galaxy in the night sky serves as a reference to traditional knowledge, encoding science and culture to a memory space, becoming part of their overarching cosmologies. This paper examines traditional views of the Milky Way from cultures around the world, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere. These views comprise dark constellations: familiar shapes made up of the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way, rather than the bright stars. Some of the better-known examples include the celestial emu from Aboriginal traditions of Australia, and the llama in Inca traditions of the Andes. We conduct a comparative analysis of cultural perceptions of dark constellations in the Milky Way, examining common cultural themes and meanings at the crossroads of Indigenous Knowledge and Western science.

Eighth Symposium on History of Astronomy, NAOJ, Japan, 2021

Orion, Taurus and Pleiades together make one of the most conspicuous set of constellations in the winter night sky in the Northern Hemisphere. However, the perspective of this combination varies significantly from culture to culture based on their individual perspective. Here we discuss how this region of the sky is imagined by different cultures.

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 2020

Cultures around the world find meaning in the groupings of stars and features in the Milky Way. The striking appearance of our Galaxy in the night sky serves as a reference to traditional knowledge, encoding science and culture to a memory space, becoming part of their overarching cosmologies. This paper examines traditional views of the Milky Way from cultures around the world, primarily in the Southern Hemisphere. These views comprise dark constellations: familiar shapes made up of the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way, rather than the bright stars. Some of the better-known examples include the celestial emu from Aboriginal traditions of Australia, and the llama in Inca traditions of the Andes. We conduct a comparative analysis of cultural perceptions of ‘dark constellations’ in the Milky Way, examining common cultural themes and meanings at the crossroads of Indigenous Knowledge and Western science with applications to topics ranging from Indigenous Studies to psychology.

Academia Letters, 2022

مجلة بحوث کلیة الآداب . جامعة المنوفیة, 2012