Physically Implied Surfaces

Little, Patrick C; Firestone, Chaz

doi:10.1177/0956797620939942

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…A related question is whether physical support needs to be inferred (via mental simulation), or whether it can be directly perceived (Little & Firestone, 2021). There is rich literature on the perception of causality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental jenga: A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about physical support.

Zhang¹,

Smith²,

Tenenbaum³

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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From building towers to picking an orange from a stack of fruit, assessing support is critical for successfully interacting with the physical world. But how do people determine whether one object supports another? In this paper, we develop a counterfactual simulation model (CSM) of causal judgments about physical support. The CSM predicts that people judge physical support by mentally simulating what would happen to a scene if the object of interest was removed. Three experiments test the model by asking one group of participants to judge what would happen to a tower if one of the blocks were removed, and another group of participants how responsible that block was for the tower's stability. The CSM accurately captures participants' predictions by running noisy simulations that incorporate different sources of uncertainty. Participants' responsibility judgments are closely related to counterfactual predictions: a block is more responsible when many other blocks would fall if it were removed. By construing physical support as preventing from falling, the CSM provides a unified account of how causal judgments in dynamic and static physical scenes arise from the process of counterfactual simulation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental jenga: A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about physical support.

Zhang¹,

Smith²,

Tenenbaum³

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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show abstract

“…With a few exceptions (e.g., Little and Firestone, 2021;Boger and Firestone, 2022), the question of how physical reasoning fits into vision remains relatively unexplored.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is "where": Physical reasoning informs object location

Boger¹,

Ullman²

2023

Preprint

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A central puzzle the visual system tries to solve is: “what is where?” While a great deal of research attempts to model object recognition (“what”), a comparatively smaller body of work seeks to model object location (“where”), especially in perceiving everyday objects. How do people locate an object, right now, in front of them? In three experiments collecting over 35,000 judgements on stimuli spanning different levels of realism (line drawings, real images, and crude forms), participants clicked “where” an object is, as if pointing to it. We modeled their responses with eight different methods, including both human response-based models (judgements of physical reasoning, spatial memory, free-response “click anywhere” judgements, and judgements of where people would grab the object), and image-based models (uniform distributions over the image, convex hull, saliency map, and medial axis). Physical reasoning was the best predictor of “where,” performing significantly better than even spatial memory and free-response judgements. Our results offer insight into the perception of object locations while also raising interesting questions about the relationship between physical reasoning and visual perception.

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“…For example, Ludwin-Peery et al ( 2020 ) recently discovered that intuitive physical reasoning (e.g., about the movement of physically interacting objects) exhibits conjunction-fallacy-like behavior, and interpreted this as evidence that physical intuitions must have a cognitive basis rather than a perceptual one (cf. Firestone & Scholl, 2016b , 2017 ; Hafri & Firestone, 2021 ; Little & Firestone, 2021 )—because perception isn’t the sort of process that could arrive at such a fallacious outcome. The present work suggests that this may not be a secure inference, if perception can indeed show conjunction-fallacy-like behavior after all.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Impossible” Somatosensation and the (Ir)rationality of Perception

2021

Self Cite

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Impossible figures represent the world in ways it cannot be. From the work of M. C. Escher to any popular perception textbook, such experiences show how some principles of mental processing can be so entrenched and inflexible as to produce absurd and even incoherent outcomes that could not occur in reality. Surprisingly, however, such impossible experiences are mostly limited to visual perception; are there “impossible figures” for other sensory modalities? Here, we import a known magic trick into the laboratory to report and investigate an impossible somatosensory experience—one that can be physically felt. We show that, even under full-cue conditions with objects that can be freely inspected, subjects can be made to experience a single object alone as feeling heavier than a group of objects that includes the single object as a member—an impossible and phenomenologically striking experience of weight. Moreover, we suggest that this phenomenon—a special case of the size-weight illusion—reflects a kind of “anti-Bayesian” perceptual updating that amplifies a challenge to rational models of perception and cognition. Impossibility can not only be seen, but also felt—and in ways that matter for accounts of (ir)rational mental processing.

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Physically Implied Surfaces

Cited by 16 publications

References 56 publications

Mental jenga: A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about physical support.

Mental jenga: A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about physical support.

What is "where": Physical reasoning informs object location

“Impossible” Somatosensation and the (Ir)rationality of Perception

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