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Contributed Talk Session: Thursday, August 6, 1:45 – 2:45 pm, Skirball Theater
Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Vision Models Capture Complementary Representations in Children That Converge in Adults

Domenic Bersch¹, Timothy Schaumlöffel¹, Michela Proietti¹, Antonia Franaszek-Traczewska², Hannah Elisabeth Zwad², Siying Xie², Marlena Baldauf³, Teresa Sylvester², Christina Maria Schätz⁴, Moritz Köster³, Stefanie Höhl⁴, Bert Turtleton², Radoslaw Martin Cichy², Gemma Roig¹; ¹Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, ²Freie Universität Berlin, ³University of Regensburg, ⁴University of Vienna

Presenter: Domenic Bersch

How the relationship between image-text aligned and vision-only models changes across development remains unknown. To address this, we applied time-resolved representational similarity analysis to EEG data from 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults. Commonality analysis showed complementary structure for image-text aligned versus vision-only models at 8 years, near-zero shared variance at 12 years, and greater overlap in adults, while both retained unique variance at all ages. This pattern generalized across model pairings, whereas vision-only model pairs showed overlapping variance at every age, suggesting a double dissociation. Within-category structure appeared complementary even in adults, suggesting that image-text aligned training may capture fine-grained structure not recovered by vision-only training. Together, these findings suggest that image-text aligned and vision-only models capture distinct aspects of visual representations that become more aligned in adulthood, and that vision-only models alone may miss structure relevant for developmental model-brain alignment.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations