Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive science has long relied on the assumption that mental representations are universal across healthy adults, treating individual differences as random noise. We challenge this assumption by proposing that representations instead conform to a limited set of organizational motifs—systematic patterns shared across subgroups of individuals. Using triadic comparisons and embedding analysis, we examine how people conceptually organize a set of DallE-generated faces, places, and objects that systematically vary in five attributes of interest per domain. We show that individuals cluster into distinct ``representational motifs" when organizing faces, places, and objects. Logistic regression analyses show that these motifs differ in the relative use of image attributes to form mental representations. Our findings demonstrate that variability in conceptual organization is not merely noise, but rather reflects meaningful patterns of shared representational frameworks that emerge naturally.