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Shared symbolic cognition across time and culture
Poster Session A, Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, Wangari Maathai
Yuxi Chu1, Xingcan Chen2, Yanchao Bi3; 1Beijing Normal University, 2Institute of Archaeology, 3Peking University
Humans uniquely externalize ideas through abstract visual symbols. Although symbols are ubiquitous across human cultures and history, it remains unclear whether humans share stable cognitive tendencies for interpreting symbol meanings. Here we address this question by testing whether humans converge on similar symbol interpretations across disconnected individuals, cultures, and historical periods in the absence of conventions. In Study 1, we collected open-ended interpretations from 1,637 participants in China and the United States for 242 historical symbols spanning different cultural contexts (China, Europe) and millennia in time (~43,000 – 3,000 BP). Participants converged on similar interpretations, and these interpretations aligned with ground-truth meanings where available. This convergence generalized across both cultures and historical periods. In Study 2, we tested whether such interpretability could be explained by visual transparency alone, operationalized as the direct generalization from natural photos to visual symbols in vision models. Five photo-trained vision models failed to generalize to symbols, and a vision-language model showed only limited success restricted to familiar symbol forms within its training distribution. Together, these results show the existence of stable shared tendencies in how humans recover symbol meaning across individuals, cultures, and time, suggesting that the interpretation of visual symbols is neither reducible to visual transparency nor dependent solely on cultural conventions. These findings help explain how human symbolic systems emerge, persist, and remain stable over time.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics,