Brain Meeting: Prof. Christopher Summerfield

Please contact ion.fil.brainmeetings@ucl.ac.uk for a Zoom link.

Connectionist models have made a comeback as theories of brain function. Most advocates of this view have compared the structure of representations in biological and artificial neural networks, and argued that they are similar. However, neural networks learn with stereotyped dynamics which in some cases can be modelled exactly. In my talk, I will discuss projects in which we compare the learning dynamics in humans and deep networks during hierarchical category learning, task switching, dual task learning, and in-context (or “meta-“) learning. In each of these cases, we find striking commonalities between the dynamics of learning in deep networks, and those in our human participants.