Today, María Silva Gago passed the viva voce for her doctoral thesis on experimental archaeology, supervised by Emiliano Bruner, a researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH). Her work centers on studying changes at the visuospatial level in the archaeopaleontological record by analyzing the visual response elicited by Lower Paleolithic stone tools.

To infer and localize these changes, for this thesis, whose title is “The perception of lithic industry: attention and visuospatial integration in the body-tool interaction in the Lower Paleolithic”, a series of experimental studies were conducted with more than 200 volunteers, whose visual attention was analyzed using eye-tracking technology.

The overall results obtained suggest that the visual attention is affected by the processing of affordances, which are the possibilities for action of a utensil. However, there are differences among the technological modes assessed. From an evolutionary perspective, these differences in visuospatial attention prompted by Lower Paleolithic tools would indicate different cognitive capacities in earlier human species.

The jury, chaired by Felipe Criado, of the Instituto Ciencias del Patrimonio (INCIPIT – CSIC) and also made up of Paula García Medrano, Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES); Javier Baena, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM); Amèlia Bargalló, PHES, and Ella Assaf, of the Universidad de Tel Aviv, awarded the new Universidad de Burgos doctor the mark of 'cum laude'.