ArticleeLife2026
A geometric shape regularity effect in the human brain.
Article in eLife, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Continuity in geometric intuition between humans and monkeys.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Initial organization and progressive expansion of the math-responsive brain network during the first school years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Can neural networks model the human perception of geometric shapes?PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Large-scale functional overlap between dorsal and ventral object-responsive networks.Research square · 2026Article
- Article
- Impact of Education and Music Training on the Development of Abstract Thinking in the First Years of Schooling.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing.iScience · 2025Article
- Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Parallel trade-offs in human cognition and neural networks: The dynamic interplay between in-context and in-weight learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Category-biased patches encircle core domain-general regions in the human lateral prefrontal cortex.Neuropsychologia · 2025Article
- Origins of numbers: a shared language-of-thought for arithmetic and geometry?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Category-biased patches encircle core domain-general regions in the human lateral prefrontal cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The perception and production of regular geometric shapes, a characteristic trait of human cultures since prehistory, has unknown neural mechanisms. Behavioral studies suggest that humans are attuned to discrete regularities such as symmetries and parallelism and rely on their combinations to encode regular geometric shapes in a compressed form. To identify the brain systems underlying this ability, as well as their dynamics, we collected functional MRI in both adults and 6-year-olds, and magnetoencephalography data in adults, during the perception of simple shapes such as hexagons, triangles, and quadrilaterals. The results revealed that geometric shapes, relative to other visual categories, induce a hypoactivation of ventral visual areas and an overactivation of the intraparietal and inferior temporal regions also involved in mathematical processing, whose activation is modulated by geometric regularity. While convolutional neural networks captured the early visual activity evoked by geometric shapes, they failed to account for subsequent dorsal parietal and prefrontal signals, which could only be captured by discrete geometric features or by bigger deep-learning models of vision. We propose that the perception of abstract geometric regularities engages an additional symbolic mode of visual perception.
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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.