The latest generation of neural networks has made major performance
advances in object categorization from raw images.
In particular, deep convolutional neural networks currently
outperform alternative approaches on standard benchmarks by
wide margins and achieve human-like accuracy on some tasks.
These engineering successes present an opportunity to explore
long-standing questions about the nature of human concepts
by putting psychological theories to test at an unprecedented
scale. This paper evaluates deep convolutional networks
trained for classification on their ability to predict category
typicality – a variable of paramount importance in the
psychology of concepts – from the raw pixels of naturalistic
images of objects. We find that these models have substantial
predictive power, unlike simpler features computed from the
same massive dataset, showing how typicality might emerge
as a byproduct of a complex model trained to maximize classification
performance