Alignment of CNN and Human Judgments of Geometric and Topological Concepts

AI and ML are poised to provide new insights into mathematical cognition and development. Here, we focus on the domains of geometry and topology (GT). According to one prominent developmental perspective, infants possess core knowledge of GT concepts, presumably underwritten by dedicated neural circuitry. We use the alignment between human cognition and computer vision models to evaluate an alternate proposal: that these concepts are learned “for free” through experience with the visual world. Specifically, we measure the sensitivity of five convolutional neural network (CNN) models to 43 GT concepts that aggregate into seven classes. We focus on CNNs over other architectures (e.g., vision transformers) because their neural plausibility has been established through studies mapping their layers to areas of the brain’s ventral visual stream. We find evidence that the CNNs are sensitive to some classes (e.g., Euclidean Geometry) but not others (e.g., Geometric Transformations). The models’ sensitivity is generally lower at lower layers and maximal at the final fully-connected layer. Experiments with models from the ResNet family show that increasing model depth does not necessarily increase sensitivity to GT concepts. The models’ profiles of sensitivity to the seven classes roughly align with the profile shown by humans, with ResNet-18 corresponding best to Western adults and DenseNet to Western children ages 3-6 years. This case study shows how CNNs can provide sufficiency proofs for the learnability of mathematical concepts and thus inform theoretical debates in cognitive and developmental science. These findings set the stage for future experiments with other vision model architectures.