Evidence that recurrent circuits are critical to the ventral stream’s execution of core object recognition behavior
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354753.full.pdf
Description
Submitted version
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Author(s)
Kar, Kohitij
Kubilius, Jonas
Schmidt, Kailyn Marie
Issa, Elias
DiCarlo, James
Date Issued
April 2019
Journal
Nature neuroscience
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Kar, Kohitij et al. “Evidence that recurrent circuits are critical to the ventral stream’s execution of core object recognition behavior.” Nature neuroscience, 22, (June 2019): 974–983 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Non-recurrent deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are currently the best at modeling core object recognition, a behavior that is supported by the densely recurrent primate ventral stream, culminating in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex. If recurrence is critical to this behavior, then primates should outperform feedforward-only deep CNNs for images that require additional recurrent processing beyond the feedforward IT response. Here we first used behavioral methods to discover hundreds of these ‘challenge’ images. Second, using large-scale electrophysiology, we observed that behaviorally sufficient object identity solutions emerged ~30 ms later in the IT cortex for challenge images compared with primate performance-matched ‘control’ images. Third, these behaviorally critical late-phase IT response patterns were poorly predicted by feedforward deep CNN activations. Notably, very-deep CNNs and shallower recurrent CNNs better predicted these late IT responses, suggesting that there is a functional equivalence between additional nonlinear transformations and recurrence. Beyond arguing that recurrent circuits are critical for rapid object identification, our results provide strong constraints for future recurrent model development.
MIT Department
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0392-5
