ArticleScience advances2022
Brain-like functional specialization emerges spontaneously in deep neural networks.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 64 papers.
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Who cites it
64 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trait judgements of faces using a task without word labels.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Self-supervised learning yields representational signatures of category-selective cortex.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Facial expression discrimination emerges from partially overlapping neural subspaces of detection and identity.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The state of modelling face processing in humans with deep learning.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Review
- Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex.Cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Neural Tuning for Ordinal Processing: Convergent Patterns in Human Brains and Artificial Networks.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Emergence of Topography and Hemispheric Lateralization in High-Level Vision.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Review
- Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Evidence Against Syntactic Encapsulation in Large Language Models.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Drawings of THINGS: A large-scale drawing dataset of 1854 object concepts.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Sensory encoding of emotion conveyed by the face and visual context.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Experience Alone Can Generate Human Face Specialization: Evidence From Deep Learning Models.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Distinct visual biases affect humans and artificial intelligence in medical imaging diagnoses.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Review
- End-to-end topographic networks as models of cortical map formation and human visual behaviour.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Text-related functionality and dynamics of visual human pre-frontal activations revealed through neural network convergence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Representational Organization of Static and Dynamic Visual Features in the Human Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Brain-like variational inference.ArXiv · 2025Article
- Personalized brain models link cognitive decline progression to underlying synaptic and connectivity degeneration.Alzheimer's research & therapy · 2025Article
- Impaired glymphatic system in patent foramen ovale based on diffusion tensor imaging analysis along the perivascular space.Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery · 2025Article
- Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
4 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The human brain contains multiple regions with distinct, often highly specialized functions, from recognizing faces to understanding language to thinking about what others are thinking. However, it remains unclear why the cortex exhibits this high degree of functional specialization in the first place. Here, we consider the case of face perception using artificial neural networks to test the hypothesis that functional segregation of face recognition in the brain reflects a computational optimization for the broader problem of visual recognition of faces and other visual categories. We find that networks trained on object recognition perform poorly on face recognition and vice versa and that networks optimized for both tasks spontaneously segregate themselves into separate systems for faces and objects. We then show functional segregation to varying degrees for other visual categories, revealing a widespread tendency for optimization (without built-in task-specific inductive biases) to lead to functional specialization in machines and, we conjecture, also brains.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.