A comparison of statistical learning of naturalistic textures between DCNNs and the human visual hierarchy

Abstract

The visual system continuously adapts to the statistical properties of the environment. Existing evidence shows a close resemblance between deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and primate visual stream in neural selectivity to naturalistic textures above the primary visual processing stage. This study delves into the mechanisms of perceptual learning in CNNs, focusing on how they assimilate the high-order statistics of natural textures. Our results show that a CNN model achieves a similar performance improvement as humans, as manifested in the learning pattern across different types of high-order image statistics. While L2 was the first stage exhibiting texture selectivity, we found that stages beyond L2 were critically involved in learning. The significant contribution of L4 to learning was manifested both in the modulations of texture-selective responses and in the consequences of training with frozen connection weights. Our findings highlight learning-dependent plasticity in the mid-to-high-level areas of the visual hierarchy. This research introduces an AI-inspired approach for studying learning-induced cortical plasticity, utilizing DCNNs as an experimental framework to formulate testable predictions for empirical brain studies.