Takehiro Nagai¹, Ruka Watanabe², Juno Kim³; ¹Institute of Science Tokyo, ²Institute of Science Tokyo, ³University of New South Wales

In English, translucency denotes a material property characterized by subsurface light scattering, as observed in wax. In contrast, Japanese does not have a single, commonly used lexical item that maps directly onto this technical concept. Such linguistic and cultural differences may influence the strategies used in everyday visual material judgments, and these influences may manifest as cross-cultural differences in the perceptual impressions derived from material appearance. The present study aimed to examine whether the characteristics of material appearance judgments for translucent objects differ across these two cultural groups. We tested 10 Australian and 10 Japanese participants. Stimuli consisted of 64 computer-generated images of translucent objects that varied in shape, surface roughness, scattering coefficient, albedo, and other parameters. In each trial, participants ranked four test stimuli with respect to their perceived similarity to a designated reference stimulus. The resulting rank-order data were treated as repeated paired comparisons and analyzed using nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to reconstruct the perceptual space defined by the stimuli. Differences between cultural groups were quantified using Procrustes-based disparity measures. Although the overall structure of the perceptual spaces was broadly similar between Australians and Japanese, a significant divergence emerged specifically in the perceptual organization of objects containing specular highlights. To account for trial-wise similarity responses, we further constructed models based on simple image features—mean luminance and contrast—as well as global object shape. For Australian observers, low-level visual features alone were insufficient; shape information contributed substantially to explaining their responses. In contrast, Japanese observers’ judgments were more readily explained by simple image features without requiring shape-based predictors. These findings suggest that cultural factors, including linguistic differences, may lead to distinct strategies in material judgment, resulting in measurable variations in the perceptual organization of material appearance.

Acknowledgements: JSPS KAKENHI 21KK0203, 23H03484, 25K22816