Cognitive Neuropsychology最新文献

There has been a recent wave of interest in understanding the mental processes underlying intuitive physics - our ability to apprehend the physical structure of the world and anticipate how objects will behave as a scene's dynamics unfold. While work to uncover the neural mechanisms of intuitive physics is just in its beginnings, vibrant lines of neuropsychological research are investigating the many facets of cognition intimately linked with the 'physics engine in the mind'. This special issue brings together a collection of papers that delve into the interactions between intuitive physics and related domains such as audiovisual scene analysis, action planning, and decision making, providing a view of the larger landscape of mental processes that allow us to predict how physical events will unfold in the next moments and plan our behaviors accordingly.

The success of visuomotor interactions in everyday activities such as grasping or sliding a cup is inescapably governed by the laws of physics. Research on intuitive physics has predominantly investigated reasoning about objects' behaviour involving binary forced choice responses. We investigated how the type of visuomotor response influences participants' beliefs about physical quantities and their lawful relationship implicit in their active behaviour. Participants propelled pucks towards targets positioned at different distances. Analysis with a probabilistic model of interactions showed that subjects adopted the non-linear control prescribed by Newtonian physics when sliding real pucks in a virtual environment even in the absence of visual feedback. However, they used a linear heuristic when viewing the scene on a monitor and interactions were implemented through key presses. These results support the notion of probabilistic internal physics models but additionally suggest that humans can take advantage of embodied, sensorimotor, multimodal representations in physical scenarios.

The cognitive system selects the most appropriate action imitative process: a semantic process - relying on long-term memory representations for known actions, and low-level visuomotor transformations for unknown actions. These two processes work in parallel; however, how context regularities and cognitive control modulate them is unclear. In this study, process selection was triggered contextually by presenting mixed known and new actions in predictable or unpredictable lists, while a cue on the forthcoming action triggered top-down control. Known were imitated faster than the new actions in the predictable lists only. Accuracy was higher and reaction times faster in the uncued conditions, and the predictable faster than the unpredictable list in the uncued condition only. In the latter condition, contextual factors modulate process selection, as participants use statistical regularities to perform the task at best. With the cue, the cognitive system tries to control response selection, resulting in more errors and longer reaction times.

Humans' flexible innovation relies on our capacity to accurately predict objects' behaviour. These predictions may originate from a "physics-engine" in the brain which simulates our environment. To explore the evolutionary origins of intuitive physics, we investigate whether capuchin monkeys' object exploration supports learning. Two capuchin groups experienced exploration sessions involving multiple copies of two objects, one object was easily opened (functional), the other was not (non-functional). We used two within-subject conditions (enrichment-then-test, and test-only) with two object sets per group. Monkeys then underwent individual test sessions where the objects contained rewards, and they choose one to attempt to open. The monkeys spontaneously explored, performing actions which yielded functional information. At test, both groups chose functional objects above chance. While high performance of the test-only group precluded us from establishing learning during exploration, this study reveals the promise of harnessing primates' natural exploratory tendencies to understand how they see the world.

To engage with the world, we must regularly make predictions about the outcomes of physical scenes. How do we make these predictions? Recent computational evidence points to simulation-the idea that we can introspectively manipulate rich, mental models of the world-as one explanation for how such predictions are accomplished. However, questions about the potential neural mechanisms of simulation remain. We hypothesized that the process of simulating physical events would evoke imagery-like representations in visual areas of those same events. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that when participants are asked to predict the likely trajectory of a falling ball, motion-sensitive brain regions are activated. We demonstrate that this activity, which occurs even though no motion is being sensed, resembles activity patterns that arise while participants perceive the ball's motion. This finding thus suggests that mental simulations recreate sensory depictions of how a physical scene is likely to unfold.