vivian paulun

I am a postdoctoral fellow working with Nancy Kanwisher and Josh Tenenbaum at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Before joining MIT, I was working in Roland Fleming’s lab at the University of Gießen.
I am studying how humans perceive and reason about the physical properties of objects or materials, such as softness or elasticity. My research combines psychophysics, computational modelling, computer simulations/graphics, 3D mesh analysis and neuroimaging to investigate the following questions:

What is the neural and computational basis of (dynamic) material perception?
How do we gain a meaningful and predictive understanding of our visual world at a glance?
How does the brain represent the physics of our surrounding world in such rich and efficient manner?
And how do we use such information to guide our actions?

Deriving functional properties from visual input is a computational challenge the visual system solves with surprising ease. Although the two-dimensional projection of the world on the retina is highly ambiguous, we gain a rich and meaningful percept of the world around us just by looking at things. We can identify objects and the materials they are made of; we know how they would feel to the touch and anticipate how they would respond to an applied force. Seeing the functional properties of objects is a central ability in order to successfully interact with our environment.

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