Shiu-Cheng Wang

Project Title: Intuitive physics studies how we naturally reason about the physical world around us. The mental computations underlying this ability remain contested. A leading current proposal is that humans have a "physical game engine" that models the world through mental simulation that unfolds the world step-by-step. A recent amendment to this proposal suggests that ‘physical simulation’ is distinct from the ‘rendering’ stage, akin to the separation that exists in computer graphics, and possibly mirroring the dorsal/ventral separation in neural visual pathways. My current project investigates how normal control participants and people with aphantasia (who lack voluntary visual mental imagery), differ in their spatial reasoning mechanisms. Specifically, we use a classic mental rotation task, in which participants judge whether two objects are the same or are mirror images of each other, and ask whether the mental imagery in the "rendering" stage affects how this judgment is made. Through computational modeling, we test whether the absence of visual imagery changes how the comparison is performed, or merely changes the subjective experience of performing it. Understanding this distinction could also inform educational design for people with diverse cognitive profiles.