Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Drawing is a versatile technique for visual communication,ranging from photorealistic renderings to schematic diagramsconsisting entirely of symbols. How does a medium spanningsuch a broad range of appearances reliably convey meaning? Anatural possibility is that drawings derive meaning from boththeir visual properties as well as shared knowledge betweenpeople who use them to communicate. Here we evaluate thispossibility in a drawing-based reference game in which twoparticipants repeatedly communicated about visual objects.Across a series of controlled experiments, we found that pairsof participants discover increasingly sparse yet effective waysof depicting objects. These gains were specific to thoseobjects that were repeatedly referenced, and went beyond whatcould be explained by task practice or the visual properties ofthe drawings alone. We employed modern techniques fromcomputer vision to characterize how the high-level visual fea-tures of drawings changed, finding that drawings of the sameobject became more consistent within a pair of participants anddivergent across participants from different interactions. Takentogether, these findings suggest that visual communicationpromotes the emergence of depictions whose meanings areincreasingly determined by shared knowledge rather than theirvisual properties alone.