Generally, the present disclosure is directed to systems and methods that train machine-learned models (e.g., artificial neural networks) to perform perceptual or cognitive task(s) based on biometric data (e.g., brain wave recordings) collected from living organism(s) while the living organism(s) are performing the perceptual or cognitive task(s). In particular, aspects of the present disclosure are directed to a new supervision paradigm, by which machine-learned feature extraction models are trained using example stimuli paired with companion biometric data such as neural activity recordings (e g electroencephalogram data, electrocorticography data, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and/or magnetoencephalography data) collected from a living organism (e.g., human being) while the organism perceived those examples (e.g., viewing the image, listening to the speech, etc.).