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Building on these findings the authors propose that cultural artifacts may thus serve as \u2018cognitive fossils\u2019 to study psychological changes throughout history. The manuscript discusses examples, such as studying parental attitudes through historical depictions of babies, or portrait paintings as a proxy for the Zeitgeist of a society, thereby grounding their claims in concrete examples."},{"key":"10.1016\/j.copsyc.2026.102386_bib56","unstructured":"This article presents a practical guide for social scientists to perform AI-assisted visual content analysis. Concretely, it proposes a methodology that bridges computer vision and social research. The proposed methodology includes three steps: pattern exploration, theory-driven image classification, and context-sensitive interpretation. Each of these steps is illustrated through empirical examples. 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A key finding of this work is that tasks which for humans appear to be of similar complexity may not equally benefit or may even be worsened by AI-assistance from AI assistance."},{"key":"10.1016\/j.copsyc.2026.102386_bib62","unstructured":"This paper studies using Multimodal Large-Language Models (MLLM) for art analysis, in particular to generate \u2018high quality formal analysis\u2019 for paintings. To ensure the MLLMs are familiar with the paintings the authors construct a dataset of almost 20K well-known paintings. For the experiments different MLLM, including GalleryGPT proposed in this work, are compared on their ability to produce formal artwork analyses. 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