View-symmetric representations of faces in human and artificial neural networks

View symmetry has been suggested to be an important intermediate representation between view-specific and view-invariant representations of faces in the human brain. Here, we compared view-symmetry in humans and a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) trained to recognise faces. First, we compared the output of the DCNN to head rotations in yaw (left-right), pitch (up-down) and roll (in-plane rotation). For yaw, an initial view-specific representation was evident in the convolutional layers, but a view-symmetric representation emerged in the fully-connected layers. Consistent with a role in the recognition of faces, we found that view-symmetric responses to yaw were greater for same identity compared to different identity faces. In contrast, we did not find a similar transition from view-specific to view-symmetric representations in the DCNN for either pitch or roll. These findings suggest that view-symmetry emerges when opposite rotations of the head lead to mirror images. Next, we compared the view-symmetric patterns of response to yaw in the DCNN with corresponding behavioural and neural responses in humans. We found that responses in the fully-connected layers of the DCNN correlated with judgements of perceptual similarity and with the responses of higher visual regions. These findings suggest that view-symmetric representations may be computationally efficient way to represent faces in humans and artificial neural networks for the recognition of identity.