CogSci 2025

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August 01, 2025

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San Francisco, United States

keywords:

concepts and categories

representation

artificial intelligence

vision

neural networks

Whether language is essential, sufficient, or a tool for numerical cognition has been hotly debated. Here, we investigate the influence of language on quantity representations by comparing embeddings from vision-only Transformer models (ViTs) and vision-language models (VLMs) exposed to image pairs depicting either the same or different stimulus quantities. If linguistic exposure stabilises quantity representations, VLMs should produce more distinct representations for image pairs with differing numerosity and more similar representations for those with identical numerosity than ViTs. We operationalized this as the variance in Cosine Similarity in response to either categorical (same/different) or continuous differences in stimulus numerosity. We find that VLMs and ViTs are sensitive to the numerosity of visual stimuli, that this sensitivity increases with layer depth, and that VLMs exhibit slightly more sensitivity to image numerosity than ViTs. This work provides initial support for the claim that linguistic exposure can, in principle, stabilise quantity representations.

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