Invariant representations of mass in the human brain
Name
elife-46619-v2.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.61 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5cc3e5770f5286028947ac86614ae587
Author(s)
Schwettmann, Sarah
Tenenbaum, Joshua B
Kanwisher, Nancy
Date Issued
2019
Journal
eLife
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019, eLife Sciences Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. An intuitive understanding of physical objects and events is critical for successfully interacting with the world. Does the brain achieve this understanding by running simulations in a mental physics engine, which represents variables such as force and mass, or by analyzing patterns of motion without encoding underlying physical quantities? To investigate, we scanned participants with fMRI while they viewed videos of objects interacting in scenarios indicating their mass. Decoding analyses in brain regions previously implicated in intuitive physical inference revealed mass representations that generalized across variations in scenario, material, friction, and motion energy. These invariant representations were found during tasks without action planning, and tasks focusing on an orthogonal dimension (object color). Our results support an account of physical reasoning where abstract physical variables serve as inputs to a forward model of dynamics, akin to a physics engine, in parietal and frontal cortex.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.7554/ELIFE.46619
