What to look forward to
Georgina Woo, a K. Lisa Yang Postbaccalaureate Research Scholar in the Kanwisher Lab, will present research on how the brain’s Physics Network decodes physical events. Using fMRI and deep learning, she’ll share evidence that the network recognizes collisions and falling objects across different scenes, then introduce a study separating contact, force, and trajectory change.
Inside the event
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.
Meet in Cambridge, MA
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Last checked: Oct 15, 2026. Confirm current availability before making plans.