Research Colloquium Cognitive Neuroscience

• Vortrag

Speaker: Nikolaus Kriegeskorte (Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Columbia University)

Title: Controversial stimuli: Optimizing experiments to adjudicate among computational hypotheses

Abstract.
Deep neural network models (DNNs) are central to cognitive computational neuroscience because they link cognition to its implementation in brains. However, DNNs have many parameters, raising the question whether they are too flexible to serve as mechanistic models of brain information processing. On the one hand, modeling intelligent behavior requires high parametric capacity. On the other hand, it is unclear how we can glean theoretical insights from overly flexible highparametric models. One approach toward a solution to this conundrum in the method of controversial stimuli. Controversial stimuli are stimuli (e.g. images, sounds, sentences) optimized to elicit distinct predictions from different models. Controversial stimuli greatly improve our power to adjudicate among models. In addition, they provide out-of-distribution probes that reveal the inductive biases implicit to the architecture, objective function, and learning rule that defines each
model.