Capability ≠ Interpretability: Human Interpretability of Vision Foundation Models

How interpretable are the features of leading vision models? The question is increasingly pressing as these models move from research benchmarks into high-stakes deployments, yet existing methods cannot answer it reliably. We close this gap with a framework for measuring and comparing the human interpretability of vision models, built around two complementary psychophysics protocols: (1) *localizability*—can an observer predict *where* a feature fires on a novel image?—and (2) *semanticity*—can an observer accurately describe *what* the feature represents? Features are recovered via sparse autoencoders, and a chance-anchored scoring function places every model on a common scale. Applying the framework to six vision transformers—two supervised ViTs and four foundation models (DINOv2, DINOv3, CLIP, SigLIP)—we collected more than $15,000$ behavioral responses, of which we analyzed $13,400$ responses from the $377$ participants who passed our pre-specified quality checks. We find that foundation models are consistently *less* interpretable than their size-matched supervised counterparts, and the gap is not a capability tradeoff: interpretability does not correlate with downstream task performance on any benchmark we examine. What does correlate is the *locality* of a feature's activations and *coarse-grained* semantic alignment with humans—models with focal activations and representations that reflect the world's broad categorical structure produce more interpretable features, whereas fine-grained perceptual alignment does not. The two protocols yield strongly correlated rankings and share the same predictors, establishing interpretability as an independent, measurable dimension of representation quality—and, surprisingly, one on which every foundation model we tested falls below the supervised baselines that came before. Capability alone cannot close that gap, but locality and coarse-grained alignment might.