Vision Models Predict Urban Scene Appraisal with Limited Neural Alignment

Pretrained vision embeddings are widely used to model how people appraise urban scenes, and they are validated almost entirely by how well they predict human ratings. Accurate prediction shows that an embedding contains the information needed to recover the ratings. It does not show that the embedding arranges scenes as the human visual system does, which is assumed when distances or dimensions in the embedding are read as perceptual. Using openly released EEG recorded while 63 adults viewed and rated street scenes of Berlin, we compared the neural representational geometry of the scenes with the geometry of pretrained vision models that differ in training objective and size, of simple image descriptors and of the ratings themselves, each relative to a noise ceiling given by the agreement between participants. No feature space reached more than about half of the noise ceiling, which corresponds to about a fifth of the reliable variance in the neural geometry. A descriptor of oriented edge energy reached the level of most pretrained models while capturing a different part of the neural geometry, and deeper layers corresponded to later neural responses. The same embeddings predicted held-out ratings well, up to r = 0.87, yet prediction accuracy and neural correspondence were not reliably related across models, and the best predictor was among the least aligned. Predicting how a street is appraised is therefore weak evidence that a model represents the street as the brain does.