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Poster A38 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Frontoparietal regions engaged in physical prediction are also involved in spatial working memory
Sam Maione1 (), Shari Liu1; 1Johns Hopkins University
Regions in the frontoparietal cortex respond when people make physical predictions, and when they deploy goal-directed attention. Is there a common neural substrate for intuitive physics and attentional demand, in individual people? We addressed this question in an open dataset in which human adults (N=28) engaged in two tasks involving (i) physical prediction and (ii) spatial working memory while undergoing functional MRI. Using pre-registered functional region-of-interest (fROI) analyses, we asked whether voxels most engaged during working memory (working memory ROIs) are also engaged during physical prediction, and vice versa for physics ROIs. We found that working memory ROIs responded equally during physical and social prediction, and therefore were not selective for physical processing. However, physics ROIs responded more during hard than easy working memory trials. These findings suggest that regions in the 'intuitive physics network' are also involved in spatial attention, and/or working memory.
Keywords: intuitive physics multiple demand network spatial working memory