It is widely claimed that deep neural networks (DNNs) provide us key new insights into how the brain operates in various domains, including vision, language, reasoning, and memory. However, these claims are made with almost no reference to psychological research. In this project we have carried out many studies that assess how well DNNs capture psychological findings across a range of domains and have shown these models often perform poorly, challenging the many strong conclusions that have been made. This work was summarized in a recent target and response article published in Behavioral and Brain Science (Bowers et al., 2023ab). Apart from conferences and invited talks, our work has be covered in the press, I was recently interviewed on the popular podcast “Brain Inspired” (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nen4ifJpZUs(opens in new window)) and Noam Chomsky highlighted my work concerning language in a recent New York Times article (
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html?searchResultPosition=1(opens in new window))
1) In the domain of vision we have achieved the following:
We have shown how DNNs do not encode objects by their parts and the relations between the parts. This contrasts with humans who explicitly encode object parts and their relations (Malhotra et al., 2023).
We have shown that DNNs encode the wrong sort of features when classifying objects (Malhotra et al., 2022).
We have shown that the adversarial images that fool networks do no fool humans in a similar way, contrary to some high-profile claims (Dujmović et al., 2020).
We have found that DNN do not support a range of Gestalt organizational principles that are central to human perception and object recognition (Biscione & Bowers, 2023).
We have shown that that Representational Similarity Analysis, is problematic in the way it is used in the literature (Dujmović et al., 2024).
We have shown that the human visual system supports on-line translation invariance (Blything et al., 2020, 2021), and improving the training environment of DNNs can help models support key properties of human vision, including translation and other invariances (Biscione & Bowers, 2021, 2022).
When we add a biological constraint to convolutional neural networks (adding ‘edge detectors’ much like simple cells in visual cortex) then the behave in a more human-like way, and do not pick up on single-pixels to identify objects (Evans et al., 2022; Malhotra et al., 2020; Tsvetkov et a., 2023).
We have developed a new benchmark for testing DNNs against key psychological findings in the domain of vision (Biscione et al., 2024).
2) In the domain of language, we have achieved the following:
We have found that models of spoken word identification show some similarities to human speech, but they also differ in fundamental ways (Adolfi et al., 2022).
We have shown that DNNs do a good job in accounting for a range of key psychological result in visual word identification (Yin et al., 2023).
We have shown that large language models can learn “impossible” languages unlike any human language and that would be difficult if not impossible to learn (Mitchell & Bowers, 2020).
We have shown that language models do not capture some fundamental syntactic generalizations that humans do, such as Principle-C (Mitchell et al., 2019).
We have developed a new empirical method to assess how well models of word naming can generalize to novel words (Gubian et al., 2022)
In domain of reasoning we have achieved the following:
We have shown that standard DNNs that have been claimed to support same/different visual reasoning in fact fail when tested appropriately (Puebla & Bowers, 2022, 2024).
We have found that networks that learn disentangled representations continue to fail in combinatorial generalization tasks (Montero et al., 2021, 2022).
We have developed new network architectures that support more widespread generalizations than standard models (Mitchell & Bowers, 2021; Vankov & Bowers, 2019).
We have shown that feed-forward networks that adapt at multiple loci outside the weights are better able to support simple logical problems (Habashy et al., 2024).
