Research Area(s)
Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience
Research Interests
Vivian Paulun is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the Department of Psychology. Her lab studies visual intuitive physics, our fundamental ability to understand the physics of a scene at a glance. Whenever we open our eyes, we instantly infer the physical properties of objects, the relationships between them, the forces acting on them, and what is likely to happen next. This ability comprises an essential component of intelligent behavior: We cannot take a single step forward without first determining if the surface will support our weight and whether the road ahead is slippery, and we cannot pick up an object without first determining its approximate mass, rigidity, and friction. Yet, how the brain infers the physical structure of the outside world from the patterns of light entering our eyes remains a major scientific challenge. Dr. Paulun’s lab combines behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to uncover the cognitive, neural, and computational mechanisms underlying visual intuitive physics.
Dr. Paulun received her B.Sc. (in 2010) and M.Sc. (in 2012) from the University of Giessen, Germany, with a major in Psychology. She completed her PhD on “Material Perception for Action” through a joint program between Giessen University and Western University in Canada in 2016 and continued as a postdoctoral fellow in Giessen with Roland Fleming from 2016-2021. Before joining the faculty at UW–Madison, Dr. Paulun was a postdoc with Nancy Kanwisher and Josh Tenenbaum in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Representative Publications
Paulun, V.C., Pramod, R.T., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Kanwisher, N. (2025). Dissociable Cortical Regions Represent Things and Stuff in the Human Brain. Current Biology, 35, 1–9
Klein, L. K. †, Maiello, G. †, Paulun, V. C., & Fleming, R. W. (2020). Predicting precision grip grasp locations on three-dimensional objects. PLOS Computational Biology, 16(8):e1008081
Paulun, V. C., & Fleming, R. W. (2020). Visually inferring elasticity from the motion trajectory of bouncing cubes. Journal of Vision, 20(6):6, 1-14
Paulun, V.C., Schmidt, F., van Assen, J.J.R., & Fleming, R.W. (2017). Shape, motion and optical cues to stiffness of elastic objects. Journal of Vision, 17(1):20, 1–22
Paulun, V.C., Kawabe, T., Nishida, S., Fleming, R.W. (2015). Seeing liquids from static snapshots. Vision Research. 115, 63-74