The ability to discriminate between large and small quantities is a core aspect of basic numerical competence in both humans and animals. In this work, we examine the extent to which the state-of-the-art neural networks designed for vision exhibit this basic ability. Motivated by studies in animal and infant numerical cognition, we use the numerical bisection procedure to test number discrimination in different families of neural architectures. Our results suggest that vision-specific inductive biases are helpful in numerosity discrimination, as models with such biases have lowest test errors on the task, and often have psychometric curves that qualitatively resemble those of humans and animals performing the task. However, even the strongest models, as measured on standard metrics of performance, fail to discriminate quantities in transfer experiments with differing training and testing conditions, indicating that such inductive biases might not be sufficient.

We propose a biologically constrained, large-scale neural network model that solves the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST has been widely used in clinical and research settings to study cognitive flexibility and executive function. The model shows a good quantitative match with human responses across a number of WCST scoring indices, while consisting of neural networks that functionally and anatomically map to brain areas and structures implicated in the task, such as the prefrontal cortex and the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamus-cortical loop. We argue that the model provides a mechanistic account of WCST solving, and demonstrate its robustness by examining its performance across a range of biologically motivated parameter values.

The semantic fluency task has been used to understand the ef-fects of semantic relationships on human memory search. Avariety of computational models have been proposed that ex-plain human behavioral data, yet it remains unclear how mil-lions of spiking neurons work in unison to realize the cogni-tive processes involved in memory search. In this paper, wepresent a biologically constrained neural network model thatperforms the task in a fashion similar to humans. The modelreproduces experimentally observed response timing effects,as well as similarity trends within and across semantic cate-gories derived from responses. Three different sources of theassociation data have been tested by embedding associationsin neural connections, with free association norms providingthe best match.