“…Moreover, several pioneering experimental studies identified a key role for real-time social feedback during visual communication in driving the increased simplification of drawings over time (Garrod, Fay, Lee, Oberlander, & MacLeod, 2007;Fay, Garrod, Roberts, & Swoboda, 2010), broadly consistent with the possibility that similar pressures shaped the emergence of modern symbol systems (Galantucci & Garrod, 2011;Tamariz, 2017;Fay, Walker, Swoboda, & Garrod, 2018). Further support for the notion that the link between pictures and their referents depends crucially on socially mediated learning comes from the substantial variation in pictorial art traditions across cultures (Gombrich, 1950) and the existence of culturally specific strategies for encoding meaning in pictorial form (Hudson, 1960;Deregowski, 1989;Hagen & Jones, 1978).…”