ArticleNature communications2023
Visual resemblance and interaction history jointly constrain pictorial meaning.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Explainable generative 3D design driven by social media semantics.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Self-reported expressibility predicts communicative success: Open dataset, validation, and simulation.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Drawing Animals in the Paleolithic: The Effect of Perspective and Abbreviation on Animal Recognition and Aesthetic Appreciation.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Layers of Social Meaning: Innate, Acquired, and Deliberative Levels of Referential Signal Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Drawings of THINGS: A large-scale drawing dataset of 1854 object concepts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Teaching Recombinable Motifs Through Simple Examples.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Drawing as a means to characterize memory and cognition.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- The Representation of Orientation Semantics in Visual Sensory Memory.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Self-Assembly Hypoxic and ROS Dual Response Nano Prodrug as a New Therapeutic Approach for Glaucoma Treatments.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Drawing as a versatile cognitive tool.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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. Pairs of participants used drawings to repeatedly communicate the identity of a target object among multiple distractor objects. 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. 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. Taken together, these findings advance psychological theories of how successful graphical conventions emerge.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.