Quantitative, data-driven models for mental representations have long enjoyed popularity and success in psychology (e.g., distributional semantic models in the language domain), but have largely been missing for the visual domain. To overcome this, we present ViSpa (Vision Spaces), high-dimensional vector spaces that include vision-based representation for naturalistic images as well as concept prototypes. These vectors are derived directly from visual stimuli through a deep convolutional neural network trained to classify images and allow us to compute vision-based similarity scores between any pair of images and/or concept prototypes. We successfully evaluate these similarities against human behavioral data in a series of large-scale studies, including off-line judgments-visual similarity judgments for the referents of word pairs (Study 1) and for image pairs (Study 2), and typicality judgments for images given a label (Study 3)-as well as online processing times and error rates in a discrimination (Study 4) and priming task (Study 5) with naturalistic image material. ViSpa similarities predict behavioral data across all tasks, which renders ViSpa a theoretically appealing model for vision-based representations and a valuable research tool for data analysis and the construction of experimental material: ViSpa allows for precise control over experimental material consisting of images and/or words denoting imageable concepts and introduces a specifically vision-based similarity for word pairs. To make ViSpa available to a wide audience, this article (a) includes (video) tutorials on how to use ViSpa in R and (b) presents a user-friendly web interface at http://vispa.fritzguenther.de.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.