Psychologie Cognitive Expérimentale

Stanislas DehaenePsychologie cognitive expérimentaleCollège de FranceAnnée 2025-2026Colloque: Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 1: Seeing and Decoding the MindIntuitive Physical Reasoning in the Human BrainColloque - Nancy Kanwisher: Intuitive Physical Reasoning in the Human BrainNancy KanwisherMITRésuméVisual scene understand requires much more than a list of the objects present in the scene and their locations. To understanding a scene, plan action on it, and predict what will happen next we must extract the relationships between objects (e.g., support and attachment), their physical properties (e.g., mass and material), and the forces acting upon them. One view is that we do this with the use of a "mental physics engine" that represents this information and runs forward simulations to predict what will happen next. Over the last several years we have been testing this idea with Josh Tenenbaum using fMRI. I will review evidence that certain brain regions in the parietal and frontal lobes (but not the