Where to draw the line?

Abstract

We often take people’s ability to understand and produce line drawings for granted. But where should we draw lines, and why? We address psychological principles that underlie efficient representations of complex information in line drawings. First, 58 participants with varying degree of artistic experience produced multiple drawings of a small set of scenes by tracing contours on a digital tablet. Second, 37 independent observers ranked the drawings by how representative they are of the original photograph. Matching contours between drawings of the same scene revealed that the most consistently drawn contours tend to be drawn earlier. We generated half-images with the most- versus least-consistently drawn contours and asked 25 observers categorize the quickly presented scenes. Observers performed significantly better for the most compared to the least consistent half-images. The most consistently drawn contours were more likely to depict occlusion boundaries, whereas the least consistently drawn contours frequently depicted surface normals.

One-shot generalization in humans revealed through a drawing task

“…By analyzing the drawings relative to copies of Exemplars, and by asking other participants to (1) categorize drawings, (2) identify their distinctive features, and (3) compare them with Exemplar shapes, we test whether the participants that drew the Variations truly generalized from single exemplars, and determine which features they relied on to do so, giving us insight into what these generative models look like and how similar they are between observers. The strength of unconstrained drawing tasks has been shown in areas such as memory ( Bainbridge et al, 2019 ), recognition ( Fan et al, 2020 ), efficient representation of both scenes ( Sheng et al, 2021 ) and part structure of objects ( Mukherjee et al, 2019 ), and developmental changes in children ( Long et al, 2019 ), making it an ideal tool to investigate categorization and one-shot learning.…”