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Abstract

Determining the extent to which the perceptual world can be recovered from language is a longstanding problem in philosophy and cognitive science. We show that state-of-the-art large language models can unlock new insights into this problem by providing a lower bound on the amount of perceptual information that can be extracted from language. Specifically, we elicit pairwise similarity judgments from GPT models across six psychophysical datasets. We show that the judgments are significantly correlated with human data across all domains, recovering well-known representations like the color wheel and pitch spiral. Surprisingly, we find that a model (GPT-4) co-trained on vision and language does not necessarily lead to improvements specific to the visual modality, and provides highly correlated predictions with human data irrespective of whether direct visual input is provided or purely textual descriptors. To study the impact of specific languages, we also apply the models to a multilingual color-naming task. We find that GPT-4 replicates cross-linguistic variation in English and Russian illuminating the interaction of language and perception.