Comparing representational reorganisation in biological and artificial neural systems during concept acquisition
DATASET COMPLETE -- April 2026
Methodological note (per Hillis, April 2026): Participants in the scanner are not passively viewing photographs. They are performing the Free Body Diagram (FBD) task -- actively identifying and evaluating Newtonian forces acting on each structure. The dissimilarity matrices therefore encode physics reasoning patterns, not visual processing. See Cetron et al. (2019) Nature Communications 10:2027 for FBD task protocol.
Dataset Status
Subjects
50
26 lab / 25 textbook
Brain Parcels
300
Schaefer parcellation
Stimuli
12
3 categories x 4 items
Data Points
990,000
Neural distances
Representational Geometry
Biological Neural DM
50-subject average | FBD task activations
CantileverTrussVertical Load
ANN Representational DM
Transformer hidden states | Same 12 stimuli
Correlation distance from [CLS] token representations
Representational Convergence
Spearman r between biological and ANN dissimilarity matrices
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Behavioural Data (uploaded April 23, 2026)
FBD Task Accuracy
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Mean across 50 subjects (range 0-85)
Quiz 1 Mean
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Topic 1 concept assessment
Quiz 2 Mean
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Topic 2 concept assessment
Subject Behavioural Scores
Subject
Group
FBD
Quiz 1
Quiz 2
Pooled
Data Provenance
EXACT50 subjects x 300 parcels x 66 neural distances (7.6 MB pickle)
EXACT12x12 category model matrix and stimulus legend
EXACT160 significant parcels identified via group-level SVM (Script 01)
The COEVO Hypothesis
Biological Pathway
Human performs FBD task on 12 structures
Human receives physics instruction (statics + topics)
fMRI measures neural DMs at 300 parcels
SVM classifies categories from DMs
Neural score correlates with quiz performance
ANN Pathway (COEVO Simulation)
Transformer processes same 12 structure descriptions
Transformer fine-tuned on same physics concepts (LoRA)
Hidden-layer activations produce DMs at each layer
Same SVM pipeline classifies categories from ANN DMs
ANN neural score compared against human neural scores