{"doi":"10.1101/2024.12.26.629294","title":"Universality of representation in biological and artificial neural networks","abstract":"Many artificial neural networks (ANNs) trained with ecologically plausible objectives on naturalistic data align with behavior and neural representations in biological systems. Here, we show that this alignment is a consequence of convergence onto the same representations by high-performing ANNs and by brains. We developed a method to identify stimuli that systematically vary the degree of inter-model representation agreement. Across language and vision, we then showed that stimuli from high- and low-agreement sets predictably modulated model-to-brain alignment. We also examined which stimulus features distinguish high- from low-agreement sentences and images. Our results establish representation universality as a core component in the model-to-brain alignment and provide a new approach for using ANNs to uncover the structure of biological representations and computations.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2024,"id":484774,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9674,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":551679,"name":"Colton Casto","orcid":"0000-0001-6966-1470","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":983403,"name":"Noga Zaslavsky","orcid":"0000-0003-3941-3518","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1202515,"name":"Colin Conwell","orcid":"0000-0002-7754-1580","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":329101,"name":"R. Mark Richardson","orcid":"0000-0003-2620-7387","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235208,"name":"Evelina Fedorenko","orcid":"0000-0003-3823-514X","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":266408,"name":"Eghbal A. Hosseini","orcid":"0000-0002-0088-9765","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":145,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:07:42.971417Z","pmid":"39764030","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}