Our visual world contains 𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘𝕤, like plants, people, animals, or vehicles. But there is also 𝕤𝕥𝕦𝕗𝕗, what these things are made of, like glass, metal, or hair.

But how do we make sense of stuff? How do we structure it in our minds? 🧵 1/n

psyarxiv.com/jz8ks This is joint work with Filipp Schmidt, @Alex_C_Schmid Roland Fleming and myself.

Let's start with the challenges faced when trying to answer the question of how we make sense of materials:

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Ok, since #IchbinHanna is trending, for everyone who doesn't know the German academic system and how messed up it is because of its weird laws and rules, here's a short version. 1/n (disclaimer: I might be getting some things wrong myself, and some of this may reflect my view on things - please correct me if I'm wrong)

I'm very happy to announce that our paper "Revealing the multidimensional mental representations of natural objects underlying human similarity judgements" has now been published in @NatureHumBehav .
nature.com/articles/s4156…
What did we learn from this work? A thread 1/n To recognize the objects around us, it is widely believed that we map our sensory inputs to an internal representations of objects. Perceived object similarity has been central to understanding mental object representations. But what determines this similarity? 2/n

THINGS: A database of 1,854 object concepts and more than 26,000 naturalistic object images
doi.org/10.1371/journa…

All concepts, images, metadata (e.g. 27 empirically-determined high-level categories) available here:
osf.io/jum2f/

THREAD 1/7 In psychology and neuroscience experiments and in AI research, we often choose objects and categories in an ad hoc manner, sometimes without knowing if observers recognize them, categorize objects the same way, or if the categories are representative or reflect sampling bias. 2/7