Implementation-Independent Representation for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Humans in Processing Faces

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) nowadays can match human performance in challenging complex tasks, but it remains unknown whether DCNNs achieve human-like performance through human-like processes. Here we applied a reverse-correlation method to make explicit representations of DCNNs and humans when performing face gender classification. We found that humans and a typical DCNN, VGG-Face, used similar critical information for this task, which mainly resided at low spatial frequencies. Importantly, the prior task experience, which the VGG-Face was pre-trained to process faces at the subordinate level (i.e., identification) as humans do, seemed necessary for such representational similarity, because AlexNet, a DCNN pre-trained to process objects at the basic level (i.e., categorization), succeeded in gender classification but relied on a completely different representation. In sum, although DCNNs and humans rely on different sets of hardware to process faces, they can use a similar and implementation-independent representation to achieve the same computation goal.