Variation in the geometry of concept manifolds across human visual cortex

Brain activity patterns in high-level visual cortex support accurate linear classification of visual concepts (e.g., objects or scenes). It has long been appreciated that the accuracy of linear classification in any brain area depends on the geometry of its concept manifolds—sets of brain activity patterns that encode images of a concept. However, it is unclear how the geometry of concept manifolds differs between regions of visual cortex that support accurate classification and those that don’t, or how it differs between visual cortex and deep neural networks (DNNs). We estimated geometric properties of concept manifolds that, per a recent theory, directly determine the accuracy of simple “few-shot” linear classifiers. Using a large fMRI dataset, we show that variation in classification accuracy across human visual cortex is driven by a variation in a single geometric property: the distance between manifold centers (“geometric Signal”). In contrast, variation in classification accuracy across early and mid DNN layers is driven by an increase in the effective number of manifold dimensions (“Dimensionality”). Despite this difference in the geometric properties that affect few-shot classification performance in the brain and DNNs, we find that Signal and Dimensionality are strongly, negatively correlated: when Signal increases across brain regions or DNN layers, Dimensionality decreases, and vice versa. We conclude that early visual cortical areas and DNN layers deploy different geometric strategies for accurate linear classification of concepts, even though both are subject to the same constraint.