What is it about?
When we walk about our lives, we rarely think about what the objects around us are made of. Yet, materials impact our lives every day, when picking out clothes, stepping on wet pavement, or stirring a thick bowl of soup. Some materials feel luxurious, like silk, while others are downright unpleasant, like slimy algae. We discovered that humans use just 36 dimensions—such as graininess, blueness, or viscosity—to represent the vast diversity of material appearances.
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Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Materials such as wool, soil, skin, granite, and jelly have complex and highly varied appearances. Our ability to recognize them is crucial for successful interactions with objects and substances in our environment, and relies a set of properties, or “dimensions” that describe their characteristics. Here, we identify a core set of dimensions, with broad implications for our understanding of human material perception.
Perspectives
This article was a collaborative effort that took several years from the initial idea to the curation of the image dataset to the collection of the data and final publication. We are therefore all the more pleased to be able to present our findings and hope we can convey some of the excitement we feel every day when studying the human mind, for example, with its amazing ability to make sense of all the materials around us.
Filipp Schmidt
Justus Liebig Universitat Giessen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Core dimensions of human material perception, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417202122.
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