When it all falls down: the relationship between intuitive physics and spatial cognition

Characterizing Chinese undergraduate students' empathizing-systemizing profiles: a person-centered approach

While the empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory provides a valuable framework for explaining gender differences in STEM majors, previous studies suffer from methodological issues (i.e., the arbitrary cut-off criteria and WEIRD sampling) as well as discrepancies in the behavioral correlates of E-S types. To address the gaps, this study utilized a 3-step latent profile analysis to identify naturally occurring E-S profiles in a Chinese sample and explored the predictors and distal outcomes of the identified profiles. The study recruited 785 (aged 18-25 years, 60% female) Chinese undergraduates. Results revealed five E-S profiles: Disengaged, Empathizers, Navigating systemizers, Technological systemizers, and Self-declared allrounders. Controlling for socioeconomic status, being male predicted a higher likelihood of membership into the Technological systemizers. Besides, membership to the Navigating systemizers and Technological systemizers was associated with better intuitive physics performance. However, no significant variation was observed for social sensitivity performance across E-S profiles. Overall, our results partially conformed to previous findings, highlighting the importance of cultural adaptation and methodological considerations when classifying students' cognitive types.

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.

Bringing cumulative technological culture beyond copying versus reasoning

The dominant view of cumulative technological culture suggests that high-fidelity transmission rests upon a high-fidelity copying ability, which allows individuals to reproduce the tool-use actions performed by others without needing to understand them (i.e., without causal reasoning). The opposition between copying versus reasoning is well accepted but with little supporting evidence. In this article, we investigate this distinction by examining the cognitive science literature on tool use. Evidence indicates that the ability to reproduce others' tool-use actions requires causal understanding, which questions the copying versus reasoning distinction and the cognitive reality of the so-called copying ability. We conclude that new insights might be gained by considering causal understanding as a key driver of cumulative technological culture.

Physical understanding in neurodegenerative diseases

This quantitative review gives an overview of physical understanding (i.e., the ability to represent and use the laws of physics to interact with the physical world) impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD), semantic dementia (SD), and corticobasal syndrome (CBS), as assessed mainly with mechanical problem-solving and tool use tests. This review shows that: (1) SD patients have apraxia of tool use because of semantic tool knowledge deficits, but normal performance in tests of physical understanding; (2) AD and CBS patients show impaired performance in mechanical problem-solving tests, probably not because of intrinsic deficits of physical understanding, but rather because of additional cognitive (AD) or motor impairments (CBS); (3) As a result, the performance in mechanical problem-solving tests is not a good predictor of familiar tool use in dementia; (4) Actual deficits of physical understanding are probably observed only in late stages of neurodegenerative diseases, and associated with functional loss.

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

Recent work has identified brain areas that are engaged when people predict how the physical behavior of the world will unfold - an ability termed intuitive physics. Among the many unanswered questions about the neural mechanisms of intuitive physics is where the key inputs come from: which brain regions connect up with intuitive physics processes to regulate when and how they are engaged in service of our goals? In the present work, we targeted the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) for study based on characteristics that make it well-positioned to regulate intuitive physics processes. The dACC is richly interconnected with frontoparietal regions and is implicated in mapping contexts to actions, a process that would benefit from physical predictions to indicate which action(s) would produce the desired physical outcomes. We collected resting state functional MRI data in seventeen participants and used independent task-related runs to find the pattern of activity during a physical inference task in each individual participant. We found that the strongest resting state functional connections of the dACC not only aligned well with physical inference-related activity at the group level, it also mirrored individual differences in the positioning of physics-related activity across participants. Our results suggest that the dACC might be a key structure for regulating the engagement of intuitive physics processes in the brain.

What makes online teaching spatial? Examining the connections between K-12 teachers' spatial skills, affect, and their use of spatial pedagogy during remote instruction

Spatial skills are critical for student success in K-12 STEM education. Teachers' spatial skills and feelings about completing spatial tasks influence students' spatial and STEM learning at both the primary and secondary levels. However, whether spatial skills and spatial anxiety differ or not between these two teacher levels is unknown. Additionally, the relations between teachers' spatial skills, spatial anxiety, and their use of spatial pedagogical practices in remote learning settings is unknown. Here, we investigated if spatial skills and spatial anxiety differ between teachers working at primary versus secondary levels, and examined the relations between their spatial skills and spatial anxiety while accounting for additional influential factors-general reasoning ability and general anxiety. Lastly, we investigated how teachers' spatial skills in conjunction with their spatial anxiety relate to their use of spatial teaching practices for online instruction. Sixty-two K-12 teachers completed measures of spatial skills, spatial anxiety, general anxiety, general reasoning, and a teaching activities questionnaire. Results indicate that spatial skills and spatial anxiety may not vary between teachers working at primary versus secondary levels, but that higher spatial skills in teachers are associated with lower spatial anxiety for mental manipulation tasks. Additionally, teachers with weaker spatial skills and lower mental manipulation anxiety reported more frequently using spatial teaching practices when teaching remotely due to COVID-19. These findings may have broad implications for teacher professional development with regards to developing students' spatial skills during remote learning.

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.