Assessing the Alignment of Popular CNNs to the Brain for Valence Appraisal

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mertens, Laurent, Yargholi, Elahe', Van Hove, Laura, de Beeck, Hans Op, Stock, Jan Van den, Vennekens, Joost
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Mertens, Laurent
Yargholi, Elahe'
Van Hove, Laura
de Beeck, Hans Op
Stock, Jan Van den
Vennekens, Joost
author_facet Mertens, Laurent
Yargholi, Elahe'
Van Hove, Laura
de Beeck, Hans Op
Stock, Jan Van den
Vennekens, Joost
contents Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a popular type of computer model that have proven their worth in many computer vision tasks. Moreover, they form an interesting study object for the field of psychology, with shown correspondences between the workings of CNNs and the human brain. However, these correspondences have so far mostly been studied in the context of general visual perception. In contrast, this paper explores to what extent this correspondence also holds for a more complex brain process, namely social cognition. To this end, we assess the alignment between popular CNN architectures and both human behavioral and fMRI data for image valence appraisal through a correlation analysis. We show that for this task CNNs struggle to go beyond simple visual processing, and do not seem to reflect higher-order brain processing. Furthermore, we present Object2Brain, a novel framework that combines GradCAM and object detection at the CNN-filter level with the aforementioned correlation analysis to study the influence of different object classes on the CNN-to-human correlations. Despite similar correlation trends, different CNN architectures are shown to display different object class sensitivities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assessing the Alignment of Popular CNNs to the Brain for Valence Appraisal
Mertens, Laurent
Yargholi, Elahe'
Van Hove, Laura
de Beeck, Hans Op
Stock, Jan Van den
Vennekens, Joost
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a popular type of computer model that have proven their worth in many computer vision tasks. Moreover, they form an interesting study object for the field of psychology, with shown correspondences between the workings of CNNs and the human brain. However, these correspondences have so far mostly been studied in the context of general visual perception. In contrast, this paper explores to what extent this correspondence also holds for a more complex brain process, namely social cognition. To this end, we assess the alignment between popular CNN architectures and both human behavioral and fMRI data for image valence appraisal through a correlation analysis. We show that for this task CNNs struggle to go beyond simple visual processing, and do not seem to reflect higher-order brain processing. Furthermore, we present Object2Brain, a novel framework that combines GradCAM and object detection at the CNN-filter level with the aforementioned correlation analysis to study the influence of different object classes on the CNN-to-human correlations. Despite similar correlation trends, different CNN architectures are shown to display different object class sensitivities.
title Assessing the Alignment of Popular CNNs to the Brain for Valence Appraisal
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21384