Abstract
Recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have introduced new ways to model the complex processes of human vision. To date, the comparison of human vision and CNNs has focused on internal representations (i.e., receptive fields), with behavioral comparisons left largely unexplored. Here, we probe the influence of cognitive strategy on the similarity between CNN output and human behavior. We gave study participants a superstitious perception task (i.e., we asked them to detect an assigned target in white noise) while asking them to engage in either an active or passive attentional strategy. Previous research has shown that an active attentional strategy tends to engage central executive functions, whereas a passive strategy allows perceptual processes to unfold with limited central control. The results showed that the pattern of human responses in the superstitious perception task depended significantly on task strategy. Specifically, detecting targets superstitiously (i.e., false alarms) was correlated with evidence of a target’s presence in the passive condition, but not in the active condition.
Human data were compared to the performance of a CNN performing the same task, with the decision criterion of the CNN set to match the false alarm rates observed in the two strategy conditions of the human participants. CNN responses resembled those of human participants in the passive condition more closely than those in the active condition. This observation suggests that the CNN does a better job of mimicking human behavior when central executive functions are not engaged than when they are engaged. This, in turn, has important implications for what human participants are doing in the superstitious perception task. Namely, it implies that superstitious perception may have two important ingredients that are somewhat dissociable. First, there is the ability to detect weak signals in noise that correspond to the target image. This appears to be what participants are doing under passive strategy conditions; they allow externally generated signals to dominate their perceptual experience. Second, there is the ability to ignore the noise in favor of basing responses solely on internally generated signals. This seems to correspond more closely to what participants are doing under active strategy conditions, when attention is controlled by representations in memory. This research emphasizes the importance of modeling the full range of human responsiveness in even a simple noisy detection task.
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- 1.
In order to ensure the stability of the CNN model, all model weights and biases were truncated to four decimal places as opposed to the unlimited number of significant digits allowed under normal CNN procedures. All analyses covered in this chapter were performed anew using the model with truncated weights. The changes had no influence on the various analyses but did noticeably reduce the quality of the generated CIs. The shape of the target was still present in both the liberal and conservative conditions. Nonetheless, the CIs lacked the clarity observed in the CIs generated from the model without truncated weights. These observations demonstrate the sensitivity of the CNN model to restricting the significant digits of the model weights. However, the observations do not change the overall conclusions of this work.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada grant (No. RGPIN-2013-36796) to J.T.E. Portions of this research were conducted as part of P. L’s MA thesis at the University of British Columbia (Aug 2017) entitled “Superstitious perception in humans and convolutional neural networks.”
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Laflamme, P., Enns, J.T. (2018). Superstitious Perception: Comparing Perceptual Prediction by Humans and Neural Networks. In: Hodgson, T. (eds) Processes of Visuospatial Attention and Working Memory. Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2018_65
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