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This study analyzes 2.6 billion sketches from 236 countries to investigate how human concepts are visually represented, revealing significant cultural variation that is often obscured by linguistic analysis. The findings indicate that visual exemplars of concepts, particularly those involving haptic interaction, demonstrate distinct differences in conceptual structure across cultures, highlighting the importance of embodied experience in shaping these representations. Notably, the research shows that visual representations align more closely with cultural distances than traditional text-based measures, suggesting that the modality of measurement critically influences our understanding of conceptual universality.
Visual representations of concepts reveal 45% more cultural nuance than traditional linguistic measures, challenging assumptions about the universality of human thought.
Claims about the universality of human concepts have been predominantly assessed through linguistic similarity across languages and cultures. However, words are effective as communication devices because they compress rich experiential variation into shared conventions, potentially obscuring hidden individual and cultural differences in how concepts are mentally represented. Here, we analyse 2.6 billion human-made sketches of common concepts from 236 countries and territories to examine conceptual structure through people's visual imagination. Consistent with recent work on image-based cognition, we find that single concepts unfold into multiple distinct visual exemplars, revealing latent information about similarities and differences in conceptual structure across cultures. This variation is strongest for concepts involving haptic interaction, suggesting that visual imagery reflects variation in embodied experience as much as conventional definitions. Comparing embedding models of sketches with word embedding models across languages, we find that their geometries diverge, with visual representations preserving rich semantic and cultural structure that language models compress. Cross-cultural similarities derived from sketches align 45% more closely with established cultural distances than do text-based measures. Together, these results suggest that patterns of human conceptual universality may depend critically on the modality through which concepts are measured, with large-scale sketching providing a direct, high-resolution probe of conceptual diversity across embodied and cultural dimensions of thought.
