Journal article

Authors list: Dobs, Katharina; Yuan, Joanne; Martinez, Julio; Kanwisher, Nancy

Publication year: 2023

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Volume number: 120

Issue number: 32

ISSN: 0027-8424

eISSN: 1091-6490

Open access status: Hybrid

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220642120

Publisher: National Academy of Sciences

Abstract: 
Human face recognition is highly accurate and exhibits a number of distinctive and well-documented behavioral "signatures" such as the use of a characteristic representa-tional space, the disproportionate performance cost when stimuli are presented upside down, and the drop in accuracy for faces from races the participant is less familiar with. These and other phenomena have long been taken as evidence that face recognition is "special". But why does human face perception exhibit these properties in the first place? Here, we use deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to test the hypothesis that all of these signatures of human face perception result from optimization for the task of face recognition. Indeed, as predicted by this hypothesis, these phenomena are all found in CNNs trained on face recognition, but not in CNNs trained on object recognition, even when additionally trained to detect faces while matching the amount of face experience. To test whether these signatures are in principle specific to faces, we optimized a CNN on car discrimination and tested it on upright and inverted car images. As we found for face perception, the car-trained network showed a drop in performance for inverted vs. upright cars. Similarly, CNNs trained on inverted faces produced an inverted face inversion effect. These findings show that the behavioral signatures of human face perception reflect and are well explained as the result of optimization for the task of face recognition, and that the nature of the computations underlying this task may not be so special after all.

Harvard Citation style: Dobs, K., Yuan, J., Martinez, J. and Kanwisher, N. (2023) Behavioral signatures of face perception emerge in deep neural networks optimized for face recognition, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(32), Article e2220642120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220642120

APA Citation style: Dobs, K., Yuan, J., Martinez, J., & Kanwisher, N. (2023). Behavioral signatures of face perception emerge in deep neural networks optimized for face recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 120(32), Article e2220642120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220642120