RT Pramod
rtpramod.bsky.social
RT Pramod
@rtpramod.bsky.social
Postdoc at MIT. Cognitive Neuroscience.
Short answer: Yes! Using MVPA we found that the PN has information about predicted contact events (i.e., collisions). This was true not only within a scenario (the ‘roll’ scene above), but also generalized across scenarios indicating the abstractness of representation.

(9/n)
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM
That is,
(8/n)

When we see this: Does the PN predict this?
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Given their importance for prediction, we hypothesized that the PN would encode object contact. In our first pre-registered fMRI experiment, we used multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and found that only PN carried scenario-invariant information about object contact.

(6/n)
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM
If a container moves, then so does its containee, but the same is not true of an object that is merely occluded by the container without contacting it!

(5/n)
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM
How do we understand, plan and predict in the physical world? Prior research has implicated fronto-parietal regions of the human brain (the ‘Physics Network’, PN) in physical judgement tasks, including in carrying representations of object mass & physical stability.

(2/n)
June 17, 2025 at 6:23 PM