Title: Violations of physical and psychological expectations in the adult human brain

Abstract: Adults are surprised to see a ball roll through a solid wall, or a person act irrationally, and even infants look longer at these same events during violation-of-expectation (VOE) studies. What mental processes account for these behaviors? Here we test two non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: (i) Violations of physical and psychological expectations involve domain-specific, distinctively physical and psychological expectations (objects are solid; agents behave rationally). (ii) VOE over these events (also) involve domain-general processes, like stimulus-driven prediction error, and goal-directed curiosity about the source of surprise. Across two experiments, we scanned 49 adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they watched videos of agents and objects, adapted from infant behavioral research. Domain-specific regions, that are preferentially engaged in social vs physical perception, showed similar preferences for our VOE stimuli involving agents and objects. One region implicated in physical reasoning responded selectively to unexpected events from the physical domain, providing evidence for domain-specific physical prediction error. Some multiple demand regions responded to surprising events from both domains, providing evidence for domain-general endogenous attention, though these regions did not pass a stronger test for domain-general prediction error. Early visual regions responded equally to surprising and expected events in both domains, providing evidence against stimulus-driven prediction error as a mechanism for VOE. Thus, in adult brains, both domain-specific and high-level domain-general regions encode violations of psychological and physical expectations. I will end by discussing how plausible it will be to test these hypotheses in infants, and what these results do and don't tell us about the neural origins of intuitive physics and psychology.

Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/8796050369