Precise functional connections between the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and areas recruited for physical inference

A dedicated mental resource for intuitive physics

Countless decisions and actions in daily life draw on a mental model of the physical structure and dynamics of the world - from stepping carefully around a patch of slippery pavement to stacking delicate produce in a shopping basket. People can make fast and accurate inferences about how physical interactions will unfold, but it remains unclear whether we do so by applying a general set of physical principles across scenarios, or instead by reasoning about the physics of individual scenarios in an ad-hoc fashion. Here, we hypothesized that humans possess a dedicated and flexible mental resource for physical inference, and we tested for such a resource using a battery of fine-tuned tasks to capture individual differences in performance. Despite varying scene contents across tasks, we found that performance was highly correlated among them and well-explained by a unitary intuitive physics resource, distinct from other facets of cognition such as spatial reasoning and working memory.

F = ma. Is the macaque brain Newtonian?

Intuitive Physics, the ability to anticipate how the physical events involving mass objects unfold in time and space, is a central component of intelligent systems. Intuitive physics is a promising tool for gaining insight into mechanisms that generalize across species because both humans and non-human primates are subject to the same physical constraints when engaging with the environment. Physical reasoning abilities are widely present within the animal kingdom, but monkeys, with acute 3D vision and a high level of dexterity, appreciate and manipulate the physical world in much the same way humans do.

What tool representation, intuitive physics, and action have in common: The brain's first-person physics engine

An overlapping set of brain regions in parietal and frontal cortex are engaged by different types of tasks and stimuli: (i) making inferences about the physical structure and dynamics of the world, (ii) passively viewing, or actively interacting with, manipulable objects, and (iii) planning and execution of reaching and grasping actions. We suggest the observed neural overlap is because a common superordinate computation is engaged by each of those different tasks: A forward model of physical reasoning about how first-person actions will affect the world and be affected by unfolding physical events. This perspective offers an account of why some physical predictions are systematically incorrect - there can be a mismatch between how physical scenarios are experimentally framed and the native format of the inferences generated by the brain's first-person physics engine. This perspective generates new empirical expectations about the conditions under which physical reasoning may exhibit systematic biases.