Context predicts commonsense notions of object similarity

What makes objects alike in the human mind? Computational approaches for characterizing object similarity have largely focused on the visual forms of objects or their linguistic associations. However, intuitive notions of object similarity may depend heavily on contextual reasoning—that is, objects may be grouped together in the mind if they occur in the context of similar scenes or events. Using large-scale analyses of natural scene statistics and human behavior, we found that a computational model of the associations between objects and their scene contexts is strongly predictive of how humans spontaneously group objects by similarity. Specifically, we learned contextual prototypes for a diverse set of object categories by taking the average response of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to the scene contexts in which the objects typically occurred. In behavioral experiments, we found that contextual prototypes were strongly predictive of human similarity judgments for a large set of objects and rivaled the performance of models based on CNN representations of the objects themselves or word embeddings for their names. Together, our findings reveal the remarkable degree to which context alone predicts commonsense notions of object similarity in the human mind.