Invariant representations of mass in the human brain
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
Abstract
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.
Data availability
All data collected in this study ia available on OpenNeuro under the accession number 002355 (doi:10.18112/openneuro.ds002355.v1.0.0).
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Intuitive physics with fMRIOpenNeuro, doi:10.18112/openneuro.ds002355.v1.0.0.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (Grant DP1HD091947)
- Nancy Kanwisher
National Science Foundation (Science and Technology Center for Brains,Minds and Machines)
- Sarah Schwettmann
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants provided informed consent before participation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institutional Review Board approved all experimental protocols (protocol number: 0403000096).
Copyright
© 2019, Schwettmann et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Invariant representations of mass in the human brain
eLife 8:e46619.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46619
