Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts
Summary
The paper analyzes 2.6 billion sketches from 236 countries to study conceptual structure across cultures, revealing that concepts have multiple visual exemplars. Visual data preserves rich semantic and cultural structure differently from language embeddings, and cross-cultural similarities based on sketches align more closely with cultural distances than text-based measures. The work highlights the importance of modality in measuring universal aspects of human concepts and suggests multi-modal data can deepen AI understandings of cognition.