Given social psychology’s poor track record on statistical techniques and research methods, I’m pretty skeptical. But this is an interesting idea:

The field of social psychology has recently embraced a psychophysical technique called “reverse correlation” that aims to do just that: To provide visual proxies of the content of mental representations. The reverse correlation method (or the “classification image technique”, as it has also been called) is a data-driven method that originated in the field of psychophysics and has its roots in signal detection theory and auditory perceptionp In signal detection paradigms, participants see stimuli that sometimes contain signal, and always contain noise. They respond to the presence of signal and their accuracy is computed based on their hits (correctly detecting the signal) and false alarms (mistakenly responding that signal was present). False alarms are particularly interesting cases, because participants might see signal in noise. The noise just happens to match the expected signal to some degree. Reverse correlation was invented to identify those features of the noise that trigger false alarms. Contemporary reverse correlation paradigms are essentially signal detection paradigms, but consist of stimuli for which the intended signal is not specified by the experimenter. The stimulus set is random and it is the participant who decides whether signal is present in a stimulus or not. This is why the technique is called “reverse correlation”: Tthe standard procedure where an experimenter specifies signal in stimuli for participants to identify is reversed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2017.1381469