Invariant representations of mass in the human brain
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).
-
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.
Reviewing Editor
- Thomas Yeo, National University of Singapore, Singapore
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).
Version history
- Received: March 6, 2019
- Accepted: December 10, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: December 17, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 7, 2020 (version 2)
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.
Metrics
-
- 3,220
- views
-
- 480
- downloads
-
- 22
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Mechanosensory neurons located across the body surface respond to tactile stimuli and elicit diverse behavioral responses, from relatively simple stimulus location-aimed movements to complex movement sequences. How mechanosensory neurons and their postsynaptic circuits influence such diverse behaviors remains unclear. We previously discovered that Drosophila perform a body location-prioritized grooming sequence when mechanosensory neurons at different locations on the head and body are simultaneously stimulated by dust (Hampel et al., 2017; Seeds et al., 2014). Here, we identify nearly all mechanosensory neurons on the Drosophila head that individually elicit aimed grooming of specific head locations, while collectively eliciting a whole head grooming sequence. Different tracing methods were used to reconstruct the projections of these neurons from different locations on the head to their distinct arborizations in the brain. This provides the first synaptic resolution somatotopic map of a head, and defines the parallel-projecting mechanosensory pathways that elicit head grooming.
-
- Neuroscience
Cortical folding is an important feature of primate brains that plays a crucial role in various cognitive and behavioral processes. Extensive research has revealed both similarities and differences in folding morphology and brain function among primates including macaque and human. The folding morphology is the basis of brain function, making cross-species studies on folding morphology important for understanding brain function and species evolution. However, prior studies on cross-species folding morphology mainly focused on partial regions of the cortex instead of the entire brain. Previously, our research defined a whole-brain landmark based on folding morphology: the gyral peak. It was found to exist stably across individuals and ages in both human and macaque brains. Shared and unique gyral peaks in human and macaque are identified in this study, and their similarities and differences in spatial distribution, anatomical morphology, and functional connectivity were also dicussed.