RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Exploring Perceptual Illusions in Deep Neural Networks JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 687905 DO 10.1101/687905 A1 Ward, Emily J. YR 2019 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/02/687905.abstract AB Perceptual illusions—discrepancies between what exists externally and what we actually see—reveal a great deal about how the perceptual system functions. Rather than failures of perception, illusions expose automatic computations and biases in visual processing that help make better decisions from visual information to achieve our perceptual goals. Recognizing objects is one such perceptual goal that is shared between humans and certain Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, which can reach human-level performance. Do neural networks trained exclusively for object recognition “perceive” visual illusions, simply as a result of solving this one perceptual problem? Here, I showed four classic illusions to humans and a pre-trained neural network to see if the network exhibits similar perceptual biases. I found that deep neural networks trained exclusively for object recognition exhibit the Müller-Lyer illusion, but not other illusions. This result shows that some perceptual computations that are similar to humans’ may come “for free” in a system with perceptual goals similar to humans’.