Cog Lunch: Georgina Woo (Kanwisher Lab)

Georgina Woo (Kanwisher Lab

Tuesday, October 20th, 2026
12pm
Location: 46-3310

Speaker: Georgina Woo (she/her)

Lab: Kanwisher Lab

Talk Title: Wake Up! What the Physics Network Actually Gives a Force About: Decoding physical events in the brain

Talk Abstract: When a ball slams into a wall or drops through a hole, we instantly understand what happened. Video game physics engines have to solve the same problem. To save computation, they leave objects “asleep” until an event like a collision or a loss of support “wakes” them up, and then they start simulating the motion of the objects. If the Physics Network, a set of parietal and frontal regions implicated in physical reasoning, functions as the brain’s physics engine, it should likewise detect these critical events. In our first fMRI experiment, people watched short videos of a ball colliding with an obstacle, falling through a hole, or doing neither, in two visually different scenes. We found that the Physics Network’s response pattern encodes which event happened, in an abstract fashion across scenarios. Finally, I’ll introduce a follow-up experiment that disentangles three features confounded in collisions (physical contact, applied force, and change in trajectory) to ask which of these the Physics Network is sensitive to.

Speaker Bio: Georgina Woo is a K. Lisa Yang Postbaccalaureate Research Scholar in the Kanwisher Lab, where she studies how the brain understands the physical world. Her work combines fMRI with deep learning models to investigate how we perceive physical events and spatial relationships. Before neuroscience, she worked in technical theatre in Singapore as a lighting designer and rigger, and apprenticed with a scenic artist and a puppet maker. At Hunter College, she majored in theatre and added a second major in computer science for fun, which eventually led her to join the lab in 2024.