Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts
I analyzed 2.6 billion sketches from 236 countries to uncover how people visually imagine common concepts. Unlike language, which compresses meaning, these drawings reveal deep cultural differences, especially in concepts involving touch. My findings show that visual representations preserve rich cultural structure better than text, suggesting our understanding of human universality depends heavily on how we measure it.
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.
- ks2048
This seems to be based on Google's QuickDraw datasets. 50 million samples are available in an open dataset,
- whycome
The most striking real world example of something similar has always been the different ways different cultures count/show numbers on a single hand (Ask a friend to show the number 3 on a hand). As far as concepts - it’s a difference in how we perceive the “starting point” of a hand.
- ggm
There's a story in Rhodes' book on the atom bomb of Otto Frisch & Liese Mettner discussing the ideation of nuclear fission analogised to cell fission, drawn as a dumbbell viewed head on with the neck of the split a circle inside the bigger cell circle:, where we classically see two cells splitting side by side with a channel between them: she meant exactly the same thing viewed 90° rotated.