ArticleeLife2022
Invariant representation of physical stability in the human brain.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Perceptual and conceptual novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- Reconstructing mental representations of block towers: A new bias for physical stability in visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 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
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 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
- Dynamic tracking of objects in the macaque dorsomedial frontal cortex.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reasoning decline during aging under familiar and unfamiliar physics.Frontiers in aging · 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
- Graspable foods and tools elicit similar responses in visual cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Inferring occluded projectile motion changes connectivity within a visuo-fronto-parietal network.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Article
- Object geometry serves humans' intuitive physics of stability.Scientific reports · 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
- Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the human adult brain.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Neural Foundations of Mental Simulation: Future Prediction of Latent Representations on Dynamic Scenes.ArXiv · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Successful engagement with the world requires the ability to predict what will happen next. Here, we investigate how the brain makes a fundamental prediction about the physical world: whether the situation in front of us is stable, and hence likely to stay the same, or unstable, and hence likely to change in the immediate future. Specifically, we ask if judgments of stability can be supported by the kinds of representations that have proven to be highly effective at visual object recognition in both machines and brains, or instead if the ability to determine the physical stability of natural scenes may require generative algorithms that simulate the physics of the world. To find out, we measured responses in both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the brain (using fMRI) to natural images of physically stable versus unstable scenarios. We find no evidence for generalizable representations of physical stability in either standard CNNs trained on visual object and scene classification (ImageNet), or in the human ventral visual pathway, which has long been implicated in the same process. However, in frontoparietal regions previously implicated in intuitive physical reasoning we find both scenario-invariant representations of physical stability, and higher univariate responses to unstable than stable scenes. These results demonstrate abstract representations of physical stability in the dorsal but not ventral pathway, consistent with the hypothesis that the computations underlying stability entail not just pattern classification but forward physical simulation.
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Registered trials
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.