Differential involvement of EEG oscillatory components in sameness vs. spatial-relation visual reasoning tasks

The development of deep convolutional networks (DCNs) has recently led to great successes in computer vision and have become de facto computational models of vision. However, a growing body of work suggests that they exhibit critical limitations beyond image categorization. Here, we study a fundamental limitation of DCNs for judging whether two items are the same or different (SD) compared to a baseline assessment of their spatial relationship (SR). We test the prediction that SD tasks recruit additional cortical mechanisms which underlie critical aspects of visual cognition that are not explained by current computational models. We thus recorded EEG signals from 14 participants engaged in the same tasks as the computational models. Importantly, the two tasks were matched in terms of difficulty by an adaptive psychometric procedure: yet, on top of a modulation of evoked potentials, our results revealed higher activity in the low beta (13-20Hz) band in the SD compared to the SR conditions, which we surmise as reflecting the crucial involvement of recurrent mechanisms sustaining working memory and attention.