The ventral, dorsal, and lateral streams in high-level human visual cortex are implicated in distinct functional processes. Yet, deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on a single task model the entire visual system surprisingly well, hinting at common computational principles across these pathways. To explore this inconsistency, we applied a novel sparse decomposition approach to identify the dominant components of visual representations within each stream. Consistent with traditional neuroscience research, we find a clear difference in component response profiles across the three visual streams—identifying components selective for faces, places, bodies, text, and food in the ventral stream; social interactions, implied motion, and hand actions in the lateral stream; and some less interpretable components in the dorsal stream. Building on this, we introduce Sparse Component Alignment (SCA), a new method for measuring representational alignment between brains and machines that better captures the latent neural tuning of these two visual systems. We find that standard visual DNNs are more aligned with ventral than either dorsal or lateral representations. SCA reveals these distinctions with greater resolution than conventional population-level geometry, offering a measure of representational alignment that is sensitive to a system’s underlying axes of neural tuning.

We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considerable viewpoint variation. We draw from a diverse range of images that include common objects (e.g., chairs) as well as abstract shapes (i.e., procedurally generated 'nonsense' objects). After constructing over 2000 unique image sets, we administer these tasks to human participants, collecting 35K trials of behavioral data from over 500 participants. This includes explicit choice behaviors as well as intermediate measures, such as reaction time and gaze data. We then evaluate the performance of common vision models (e.g., DINOv2, MAE, CLIP). We find that humans outperform all models by a wide margin. Using a multi-scale evaluation approach, we identify underlying similarities and differences between models and humans: while human-model performance is correlated, humans allocate more time/processing on challenging trials. All images, data, and code can be accessed via our project page.