CNNs Reveal the Computational Implausibility of the Expertise Hypothesis

Kanwisher, N., Gupta, P., & Dobs, K.
iScience 26 (2) (2023).

Abstract

Face perception has long served as a classic example of domain specificity of mind and brain. But an alternative “expertise” hypothesis holds that putatively face-specific mechanisms are actually domain-general, and can be recruited for the perception of other objects of expertise (e.g., cars for car experts). Here, we demonstrate the computational implausibility of this hypothesis: Neural network models optimized for generic object categorization provide a better foundation for expert fine-grained discrimination than do models optimized for face recognition.