  Recurrent connections in the visual cortex are thought to aid object
recognition when part of the stimulus is occluded. Here we investigate if and
how recurrent connections in artificial neural networks similarly aid object
recognition. We systematically test and compare architectures comprised of
bottom-up (B), lateral (L) and top-down (T) connections. Performance is
evaluated on a novel stereoscopic occluded object recognition dataset. The task
consists of recognizing one target digit occluded by multiple occluder digits
in a pseudo-3D environment. We find that recurrent models perform significantly
better than their feedforward counterparts, which were matched in parametric
complexity. Furthermore, we analyze how the network's representation of the
stimuli evolves over time due to recurrent connections. We show that the
recurrent connections tend to move the network's representation of an occluded
digit towards its un-occluded version. Our results suggest that both the brain
and artificial neural networks can exploit recurrent connectivity to aid
occluded object recognition.
