# Extracting low-dimensional psychological representations from convolutional neural networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14363 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14363/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

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- [Explaining Human Comparisons using Alignment-Importance Heatmaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16292/) (2024)
- [Replicating Human Social Perception in Generative AI: Evaluating the Valence-Dominance Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04842/) (2025)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks are increasingly being used in cognitive modeling as a means of deriving representations for complex stimuli such as images. While the predictive power of these networks is high, it is often not clear whether they also offer useful explanations of the task at hand. Convolutional neural network representations have been shown to be predictive of human similarity judgments for images after appropriate adaptation. However, these high-dimensional representations are difficult to interpret. Here we present a method for reducing these representations to a low-dimensional space which is still predictive of similarity judgments. We show that these low-dimensional representations also provide insightful explanations of factors underlying human similarity judgments.
