Capability neq Interpretability: Human Interpretability of Vision Foundation Models

How interpretable are the features of leading vision models? The question is increasingly pressing as these models move from research benchmarks into high-stakes deployments, yet existing methods cannot answer it reliably. We address this gap with a framework for measuring and comparing the human interpretability of vision models, built around two complementary psychophysics protocols: (1) localizability---can an observer predict where a feature fires on a novel image?---and (2) semanticity---can an observer accurately describe what the feature represents? Features are recovered via sparse autoencoders, and a chance-anchored scoring function places every model on a common scale. Applying the framework to six vision transformers---two supervised ViTs and four foundation models (DINOv2, DINOv3, CLIP, SigLIP)---we collected more than 15,000 behavioral responses, of which we analyzed 13,400 responses from the 377 participants who passed our pre-specified quality checks. We find that foundation models are consistently less interpretable than their size-matched supervised counterparts, and the gap is not a capability tradeoff: interpretability does not correlate with downstream task performance on any benchmark we examine. What does correlate is the locality of a feature's activations and coarse-grained semantic alignment with humans---models with focal activations and representations that reflect the world's broad categorical structure tend to produce more interpretable features. The two protocols yield strongly correlated rankings and share the same predictors, establishing interpretability as an independent, measurable dimension of representation quality---and, surprisingly, one on which the foundation models we tested fall below their size-matched supervised baseline. Capability alone cannot close that gap, but locality and coarse-grained alignment might.