Insights from Machine Learning Applied to Human Visual Classification

We attempt to understand visual classification in humans using both psychophysical and machine learning techniques. Frontal views of human faces were used for a gender classification task. Human subjects classified the faces and their gender judgment, reaction time and confidence rating were recorded. Several hyperplane learning algorithms were used on the same classification task using the Principal Components of the texture and flowfield representation of the faces. The classification performance of the learning algorithms was estimated using the face database with the true gender of the faces as labels, and also with the gender estimated by the subjects. We then correlated the human responses to the distance of the stimuli to the separating hyperplane of the learning algorithms. Our results suggest that human classification can be modeled by some hyperplane algorithms in the feature space we used. For classification, the brain needs more processing for stimuli close to that hyperplane than for those further away.