CogSci 2025

•

August 02, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

cognitive neuroscience

computational neuroscience

perception

machine learning

vision

Understanding human perception of visual complexity is crucial in visual cognition. Recently (Shen, et al. 2024) proposed an interpretable segmentation-based model that accurately predicted complexity across various datasets, supporting the idea that complexity can be explained simply. In this work, we investigate the failure of their model to capture structural, color and surprisal contributions to complexity. To this end, we propose Multi-Scale Sobel Gradient which measures spatial intensity variations, Multi-Scale Unique Color which quantifies colorfulness across multiple scales, and surprise scores generated using a Large Language Model. We test our features on existing benchmarks and a novel dataset containing surprising images from Visual Genome. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling complexity accurately is not as simple as previously thought, requiring additional perceptual and semantic factors to address dataset biases. Thus our results offer deeper insights into how humans assess visual complexity.

Downloads

PaperTranscript English (automatic)

Next from CogSci 2025

Verbs are sometimes redundant: Korean preschoolers’ comprehension of Korean active transitive construction
poster

Verbs are sometimes redundant: Korean preschoolers’ comprehension of Korean active transitive construction

CogSci 2025

Gyu-Ho Shin

02 August 2025

Similar lecture

Simplicity in Complexity
poster

Simplicity in Complexity

CogSci 2024

Surabhi Nath

25 July 2024