Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

e effortlessly grasp the correspondence between a drawingof an object and that physical object in the world, even whenthe drawing is far from realistic. How are visual objectconcepts organized such that we can both recognize theseabstract correspondences and also flexibly exploit them whencommunicating them to others in a drawing? Here we considerthe notion that the compositional nature of object conceptsenables us to readily decompose both objects and drawings ofobjects into a common set of semantically meaningful parts.To investigate this, we collected data on the part informationexpressed in drawings by having participants densely annotatedrawings of real-world objects. Our dataset contained bothdetailed and sparser drawings produced in different commu-nicative contexts. We found that: (1) people are consistentin what they interpret individual strokes to represent; (2)single strokes tend to correspond to single parts, with strokesrepresenting the same part often being clustered in time; and(3) both sparse and detailed drawings of the same object em-phasize similar part information, although detailed drawingsof different objects are more distinct from one another thansparse drawings. Taken together, our results support the notionthat people flexibly deploy their abstract understanding ofthe compositional part structure of objects to communicaterelevant information about them in context. More broadly,they highlight the importance of structured knowledge forunderstanding how pictorial representations convey meaning.