The Platonic Brain: Representational Convergence in EEG Foundation Models

Abstract:The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) predicts that artificial neural networks converge on shared representations as scale and performance increase. We test whether these predictions hold for representations of the human brain with EEG foundation models. Using EEG recordings from six participants watching a television series, together with aligned visual and language content, we tested whether EEG foundation-model representations converge within and across modalities as their embeddings become better at decoding an informative set of EEG markers. We found that EEG models with greater decodability showed stronger cross-family alignment in both local neighbourhood similarity and global structure, not consistently increasing with model parameter count. Cross-modal convergence was modality and metric dependent: greater EEG decodability was associated with stronger global alignment to language, but not consistently to vision models, while local alignment showed no consistent association. This dissociation may reflect local sensitivity to low-level sensory features, whereas global geometry may capture weaker shared semantic structure.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2611.05097 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2611.05097v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.05097 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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