From edges to meaning: Semantic line sketches as a cognitive scaffold for ancient pictograph invention
Humans readily recognize objects from sparse line drawings, a capacity that appears early in development and persists across cultures, suggesting neural rather than purely learned origins. Yet the computational mechanism by which the brain transforms high-level semantic knowledge into low-level visual symbols remains poorly understood. Here we propose that ancient pictographic writing emerged from the brain's intrinsic tendency to compress visual input into stable, boundary-based abstractions. We construct a biologically inspired digital twin of the visual hierarchy that encodes an image into low-level features, generates a contour sketch, and iteratively refines it through top-down feedb...
| Authors | Seowung Leem, Lin Gu, Ruogu Fang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 14 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 April 2026 |
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