ArticleScience advances2024
Contrastive learning explains the emergence and function of visual category-selective regions.
Article in Science advances, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Principal bundle geometry of qualia: Understanding the quality of consciousness from symmetry.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Self-supervised learning yields representational signatures of category-selective cortex.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Multidimensional Feature Tuning in Category Selective Areas of Human Visual Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Integrating neuroscience across species and scales.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Category selectivity observed in the human brain is distinct from category selectivity observed in artificial neural networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Combined evidence from artificial neural networks and human brain-lesion models reveals that language modulates vision in human perception.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Achieving more human brain-like vision via human EEG representational alignment.Communications biology · 2026Article
- A 7T fMRI dataset of synthetic images for out-of-distribution modeling of vision.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A Systematic Review of Contrastive Learning in Medical AI: Foundations, Biomedical Modalities, and Future Directions.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Investigating action topography in visual cortex and deep artificial neural networks.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in category selectivity in visual cortex following pediatric cortical resection.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Multiarea processing in body patches of the primate inferotemporal cortex implements inverse graphics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Object knowledge representation in the human visual cortex requires a connection with the language system.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Rarely categorical, always high-dimensional: how the neural code changes along the cortical hierarchy.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Modular and distributed coding theories of category selectivity along the human ventral visual stream have long existed in tension. Here, we present a reconciling framework-contrastive coding-based on a series of analyses relating category selectivity within biological and artificial neural networks. We discover that, in models trained with contrastive self-supervised objectives over a rich natural image diet, category-selective tuning naturally emerges for faces, bodies, scenes, and words. Further, lesions of these model units lead to selective, dissociable recognition deficits, highlighting their distinct functional roles in information processing. Finally, these pre-identified units can predict neural responses in all corresponding face-, scene-, body-, and word-selective regions of human visual cortex, under a highly constrained sparse positive encoding procedure. The success of this single model indicates that brain-like functional specialization can emerge without category-specific learning pressures, as the system learns to untangle rich image content. Contrastive coding, therefore, provides a unifying account of object category emergence and representation in the human brain.
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