![]() ![]() This view is supported by developmental 19 and computational modeling 20 work that has highlighted the importance of social context for explaining how people can robustly identify the referent of even very sparse drawings. What characterizes such conventional accounts is that they rely on associative learning mechanisms that operate over socially mediated experiences, beyond pre-existing perceptual competence. On the other hand, other work has supported a symbol-based account, by pointing out the critical role that conventions play in determining how drawings denote objects 17, 18. For example, higher non-human primates 14, human infants 15, and human adults living in remote regions without pictorial art traditions and without substantial contact with Western visual media 16 are all able to recognize line drawings of familiar objects, even without substantial prior experience with drawings. Together, these findings are convergent with evidence from comparative, developmental, and cross-cultural studies of drawing perception. Further, visually evoked representations of an object in human visual cortex measured with fMRI can be leveraged to decode the identity of that object during drawing production, suggesting that functionally similar neural representations are recruited during both object perception and drawing production 13. These results provide support for the notion that perceiving the correspondence between drawings and real-world objects can arise from the same general-purpose neural architecture evolved to handle natural visual inputs 10, 11, 12, rather than relying on any special mechanisms dedicated to handling drawn images. Recent work has shown that features learned by deep convolutional neural network models (DCNNs) trained only to recognize objects in photos, but have never seen a line drawing, nevertheless succeed in recognizing simple drawings 9. On the one hand, there is strong evidence in favor of the image-based account, insofar as general-purpose visual processing mechanisms are sufficient to explain how people are able to understand what drawings mean. Do viewers understand drawings based solely on their ability to resemble the entities they refer to (i.e., as images), or do they understand drawings based on shared but arbitrary associations with these entities (i.e., as symbols)? In particular, it is not clear how drawing enables the flexible expression of meanings across different levels of visual abstraction, ranging from realistic depictions to schematic diagrams. Yet current theories of depiction fall short of explaining how humans are capable of leveraging drawings in such varied ways. The expressiveness of drawings has long provided inspiration for scientists investigating the mental representation of concepts in children 5, 6 and clinical populations 7, 8. Perhaps the most basic and versatile of these technologies is drawing, which predates the invention of writing 1, 2, 3 and is pervasive across many cultures 4. Throughout human history, people have devised a variety of technologies to externalize and share their ideas in more durable visual formats. ![]() Human communication goes well beyond the exchange of words. Taken together, these findings advance psychological theories of how successful graphical conventions emerge. Leveraging model-based image analyses and crowdsourced annotations, we further determined that drawings did not drift toward “arbitrariness,” as predicted by a pure convention-based account, but preserved visually diagnostic features. We manipulated social cues across three experiments and a full replication, finding that participants developed object-specific and interaction-specific strategies for communicating more efficiently over time, beyond what task practice or a resemblance-based account alone could explain. Pairs of participants used drawings to repeatedly communicate the identity of a target object among multiple distractor objects. How do drawings-ranging from detailed illustrations to schematic diagrams-reliably convey meaning? Do viewers understand drawings based on how strongly they resemble an entity (i.e., as images) or based on socially mediated conventions (i.e., as symbols)? Here we evaluate a cognitive account of pictorial meaning in which visual and social information jointly support visual communication. ![]()
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