  Deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) play a major role in modeling the
visual pathways of primate and rodent. However, they highly simplify the
computational properties of neurons compared to their biological counterparts.
Instead, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are more biologically plausible models
since spiking neurons encode information with time sequences of spikes, just
like biological neurons do. However, there is a lack of studies on visual
pathways with deep SNNs models. In this study, we model the visual cortex with
deep SNNs for the first time, and also with a wide range of state-of-the-art
deep CNNs and ViTs for comparison. Using three similarity metrics, we conduct
neural representation similarity experiments on three neural datasets collected
from two species under three types of stimuli. Based on extensive similarity
analyses, we further investigate the functional hierarchy and mechanisms across
species. Almost all similarity scores of SNNs are higher than their
counterparts of CNNs with an average of 6.6%. Depths of the layers with the
highest similarity scores exhibit little differences across mouse cortical
regions, but vary significantly across macaque regions, suggesting that the
visual processing structure of mice is more regionally homogeneous than that of
macaques. Besides, the multi-branch structures observed in some top mouse
brain-like neural networks provide computational evidence of parallel
processing streams in mice, and the different performance in fitting macaque
neural representations under different stimuli exhibits the functional
specialization of information processing in macaques. Taken together, our study
demonstrates that SNNs could serve as promising candidates to better model and
explain the functional hierarchy and mechanisms of the visual system.
