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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Emergent mid-level visual representations from a developmentally inspired contrast sensitivity curriculum

Chelsea B. Kim¹, Marieke Mur¹; ¹University of Western Ontario

Presenter: Chelsea B. Kim

How constraints imposed by early visual system development shape object perception is central to understanding human vision, but remains poorly understood. Here, we ask how rapid developmental changes in the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) shape internal representations and behaviour. We trained ResNet-50 models with and without a simulated developmental CSF trajectory ("CSF curriculum") and examined differences in internal representations and task performance. Training with the CSF curriculum improved model alignment with mid-level representations of the ventral visual stream. However, these representational changes did not translate to improved downstream performance on face identification or object categorization tasks, revealing a dissociation between representation and behaviour. These results suggest that a developmentally inspired CSF curriculum can drive the emergence of brain-like intermediate representations, but that effective downstream behavioural performance may require additional constraints on how these representations are utilized.

Topic Area: Computational Models of Vision & Visual Cortex