Similar Choices, Different Attention: Cross-Modal Associations in Humans and Vision-Language Models
Cross-modal associations are systematic pairings of features across modalities, such as the association of 'bouba' with round shapes and 'kiki' with sharp shapes. Prior work has compared humans and vision-language models (VLMs) on such associations, but often using different stimuli or tasks between humans and models. Here, we ask whether VLMs align with humans not only in choices, but also in where they look when making those choices. We study both VLMs and humans (N = 53), presenting them with the same stimuli, a pseudo-word and two images, and record participants' choices and eye movements, which we release. We find choice alignment in a few larger VLMs, but their saliency matches huma...
| Authors | Sumin Hong, Katsumi Ibaraki, Renee Shi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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