Core dimensions of human material perception

Abstract

Visually categorizing and comparing materials is crucial for everyday behavior, but what organizational principles underlie our mental representation of materials? Here, we used a large-scale data-driven approach to uncover core latent dimensions of material representations from behavior. First, we created an image dataset of 200 systematically sampled materials and 600 photographs (STUFF dataset, https://osf.io/myutc/ ). Using these images, we next collected 1.87 million triplet similarity judgments and used a computational model to derive a set of sparse, positive dimensions underlying these judgments. The resulting multidimensional embedding space predicted independent material similarity judgments and the similarity matrix of all images close to the human intersubject consistency. We found that representations of individual images were captured by a combination of 36 material dimensions that were highly reproducible and interpretable, comprising perceptual (e.g., grainy, blue) as well as conceptual (e.g., mineral, viscous) dimensions. These results provide the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of how humans make sense of materials.