ArticleeLife2019
Invariant representations of mass in the human brain.
Article in eLife, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reconstructing mental representations of block towers: A new bias for physical stability in visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Hierarchical and context-dependent encoding of actions in human posterior parietal and motor cortex.Cell · 2026Article
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2026Article
- Distinct and shared neural resources between processing of dynamic physical objects and spatial working memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The visual perception of relative mass from object collisions.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Anticipatory gaze in a reaching-and-grasping task when target movement direction is uncertain: evidence of statistical learning.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Hierarchical and Context-Dependent Encoding of Actions in Human Posterior Parietal and Motor Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Object representations in human ventral and dorsal cortex depend on display format and physical distance.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- The identification of materials from patterns of fluid flow.Journal of vision · 2025Article
- Computational models reveal that intuitive physics underlies visual processing of soft objects.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Decoding predicted future states from the brain's "physics engine".Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Population encoding of observed and actual somatosensations in the human posterior parietal cortex.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Hierarchical surprise signals in naturalistic violation of expectations.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Are You a Closet Dualist? Evidence From Brief Implicit Association Task.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Invariant representations in abstract concept grounding - the physical world in grounded cognition.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Perception of 3D shape integrates intuitive physics and analysis-by-synthesis.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- A dedicated mental resource for intuitive physics.iScience · 2024Article
- The Role of Agentive and Physical Forces in the Neural Representation of Motion Events.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
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3 authors.
Funding
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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.