Unsupervised predictive coding models may explain visual brain representation

Deep predictive coding networks are neuroscience-inspired unsupervised learning models that learn to predict future sensory states. We build upon the PredNet implementation by Lotter, Kreiman, and Cox (2016) to investigate if predictive coding representations are useful to predict brain activity in the visual cortex. We use representational similarity analysis (RSA) to compare PredNet representations to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from the Algonauts Project (Cichy et al., 2019). In contrast to previous findings in the literature (Khaligh-Razavi & Kriegeskorte, 2014), we report empirical data suggesting that unsupervised models trained to predict frames of videos may outperform supervised image classification baselines in terms of correlation to spatial (fMRI) data. Our best submission achieves an average noise normalized correlation score of 16.67% and 27.67% on the fMRI and MEG tracks of the Algonauts Challenge.