Vision Models Capture Complementary Representations in Children That Converge in Adults

arXiv:2610.16860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How the relationship between image-text aligned and vision-only models changes across development remains unknown. We applied time-resolved representational similarity analysis to EEG data from 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults. CLIP showed significant model-brain alignment already in children, whereas vision-only models aligned more strongly later in development. Residual analyses revealed complementary structure, with CLIP retaining alignment beyond an architecture-matched vision-only model from age 8. Much of the model-brain alignment reflected semantic structure, with EEG representations of category and animacy strengthening toward adulthood, while alignment with low-level image properties remained weak across age. Together, these findings suggest that image-text aligned and vision-only models capture complementary aspects of developing visual representations and may provide useful constraints for AI systems that aim to learn and adapt over time.

Characterizing Universal Object Representations Across Vision Models

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-10-14

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