The Importance of Formalizing Computational Models of Face Adaptation Aftereffects

David A. Ross, Thomas J. Palmeri

Face adaptation is widely used as a means to probe the neural representations that support face recognition. While the theories that relate face adaptation to behavioral aftereffects may seem conceptually simple, our work has shown that testing computational instantiations of these theories can lead to unexpected results. Instantiating a model of face adaptation not only requires specifying how faces are represented and how adaptation shapes those representations but also specifying how decisions are made, translating hidden representational states into observed responses. Considering the high-dimensionality of face representations, the parallel activation of multiple representations, and the non-linearity of activation functions and decision mechanisms, intuitions alone are unlikely to succeed. If the goal is to understand mechanism, not simply to examine the boundaries of a behavioral phenomenon or correlate behavior with brain activity, then formal computational modeling must be a component of theory testing. To illustrate, we highlight our recent computational modeling of face adaptation aftereffects and discuss how models can be used to understand the mechanisms by which faces are recognized.