Post by Andrea Baronchelli

New preprint out: Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts What does human conceptual space look like, and how much does culture shape it? Words are useful because they compress experience. But some of what they compress away is cognitively important. We analysed 2.6 billion sketches from around the world to study concepts through visual imagination. The picture is richer than a word-based map suggests. Human concepts are shaped by the body, by perception, and by culture in ways that language alone only partly captures. This matters today more than ever. AI trained mostly on text learns human concepts after experience has been squeezed into words. Our paper shows what gets lost in that squeeze: visual exemplars, embodied associations, and cultural structure that remain central to how people think. Link: https://lnkd.in/eFjxkg9M Fantastic work by Arianna Pera with Mauro Martino, and Nima Dehmamy, Douglas Guilbeault and Luca Maria Aiello.