Mohammad Atari Co-authors Study on How AI Can Measure Our Cultural History

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Human emotions and behaviors from the past leave no physical trace, but cultural artifacts—paintings, novels, music, and other art—offer valuable clues.

Researchers are now using these works to explore how people in earlier societies may have thought and felt, referring to them as “cognitive fossils.” Once the domain of humanities scholars working painstakingly by hand, this search has been transformed by advances in computing and artificial intelligence (AI). Historic materials spanning centuries are being digitized, allowing algorithms to detect patterns in vast cultural datasets that were once beyond human reach.

ScienceNews recently published an article focused on this research into cognitive fossils, and asked Mohammad Atari—assistant professor in the College of Natural Sciences’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and co-author of a new study on the topic published in Nature Human Behaviour—to weigh in on the emerging field.

“We can get to know more about the psychology of people who lived before us.”

— Mohammad Atari

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