ViSpa (Vision Spaces): A computer-vision-based representation system for individual images and concept prototypes, with large-scale evaluation

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.