An Approximate Representation of Objects Underlies Physical Reasoning

Li, Yichen; Wang, YingQiao; Boger, Tal; Smith, Kevin A.; Gershman, Samuel J.; Ullman, Tomer

doi:10.31234/osf.io/vebu5

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Research on memory for object identity suggests that infants younger than 12 months are less sensitive to a change in object identity than to a change in object location [ 34 , 53 , 54 ], which may be related to knowledge of object action affordance 4 [ 55 ]. Recent research shows that, when tracking a moving object, even adults have only a coarse approximation of the object's form [ 56 ]. Thus, it is plausible that what infants represent at the co-witnessed location—or what they generate from tracking the other's attention—is a representation of something relevant at this location, but not necessarily a detailed representation of the object (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory

et al. 2023

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Young learners would seem to face a daunting challenge in selecting to what they should attend, a problem that may have been exacerbated in human infants by changes in carrying practices during human evolution. A novel theory proposes that human infant cognition has an altercentric bias whereby early in life, infants prioritize encoding events that are the targets of others’ attention. We tested for this bias by asking whether, when the infant and an observing agent have a conflicting perspective on an object's location, the co-witnessed location is better remembered. We found that 8- but not 12-month-olds expected the object to be at the location where the agent had seen it. These findings suggest that in the first year of life, infants may prioritize the encoding of events to which others attend, even though it may sometimes result in memory errors. However, the disappearance of this bias by 12 months suggests that altercentricism is a feature of very early cognition. We propose that it facilitates learning at a unique stage in the life history when motoric immaturity limits infants' interaction with the environment; at this stage, observing others could maximally leverage the information selection process.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory

et al. 2023

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“…Much research on memory for object identity suggests that infants younger than 12 months are less sensitive to a change in object identity than to a change in object location (Kibbe & Leslie, 2011;Newcombe et al, 1999), especially if, as in the current study, they know the object to be graspable (Mareschal & Johnson, 2003). A recent study shows that, when tracking a moving object, even adults have only a coarse approximation of the object's form (Li et al, 2022). Thus, it is plausible that what infants represent at the co-witnessed location -or what they generate from tracking the other's attention -is a representation of something relevant at this location, but not necessarily a detailed representation of the object (a pink ball).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 46%

Altercentric bias in preverbal infants memory

Manea¹,

Kampis²,

Wiesmann³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Human infants would seem to face a daunting challenge in selecting what they should attend, encode and remember. We investigated whether early in life, infants might use others’ attention as an exploitable source of information filtering, by prioritizing the encoding of events that are co-witnessed with someone else over events witnessed alone. In a series of studies (n=255), we show that infants who can otherwise remember an object’s location, misremembered the object where another agent had seen it, even if infants themselves had subsequently seen the object move somewhere else. With further exploratory analyses, we also found that infants’ attention to the agent rather than the object seems to drive their memory for the object’s location. This series points to an initial encoding bias that likely facilitates information selection but which can, under some circumstances, lead to predictable memory errors.

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“…The objects we considered were relatively simple and regular, and oddly shaped bodies may lead to various biases and deviations from the ground truth. In particular, other work suggests that people may be using approximate bodies for physical reasoning and tracking (Li et al, 2022;. If this is true, people may be considering only approximate bodies for fluid simulations as well.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resource bounds on mental simulations: Evidence from a fluid-reasoning task

Ullman¹,

Wang²

2023

Preprint

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eople are able to reason about the physical dynamics of everyday objects. One proposal for the computations underlying this ability is that people are running an approximate mental simulation of their environment. However, such a simulation must be limited in its resources. We applied the notion of a resource-bound simulation to a fluid reasoning task, and show people’s changing behavior can be explained by an approximate simulation that hits a resource limit after some time elapses. In Experiments 1 and 2, people performed well on tasks that asked them to estimate the time-to-fill and water level of different containers, when filled over short periods of time (1-7 seconds). Experiment 3 shows systematic biases in visual volume estimation, which further strengthens the proposal that people are using a simulation to solve the first two experiments. Experiment 4 extends the reasoning time for the time-to-fill task, and shows the existence of a ‘switch point’, as expected from a resource-bound simulation model. The model also accounts for individual differences: People who perform worse on a digit-span task have an earlier switch point.

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An Approximate Representation of Objects Underlies Physical Reasoning

Cited by 5 publications

References 18 publications

An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory

An initial but receding altercentric bias in preverbal infants' memory

Altercentric bias in preverbal infants memory

Resource bounds on mental simulations: Evidence from a fluid-reasoning task

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