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Vivian Paulun

About me

I am a Postdoctoral Associate working with Nancy Kanwisher and Josh Tenenbaum at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.
Before joining MIT with a fellowship from the German Research Foundation, I was working in Roland Fleming’s lab at the University of Gießen.
I did my PhD within the “Brain in Action” Network with Roland Fleming and Karl Gegenfurtner at Gießen University and Mel Goodale at Western University.

I’ll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2025.
Please reach out if you are interested in joining the lab!


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About my research

My work focuses on the visual perception of materials and intuitive physics.
At a glance, we get a rich and deep understanding of the physical world around us. Not only can we recognize objects, we also get a sense of their internal (material) properties: We can see how an object would feel when touched, squeezed or lifted and, importantly, we can predict its possible futures.
How do humans perceive and reason about the physical properties of objects or materials, such as softness or elasticity? How does the human brain represent materials and their properties in such rich and efficient manner? What is the computational basis of visual intuitive physics?
To study these questions, I combine psychophysics, neuroimaging, computational modeling, physical simulations and computer graphics.