Seeing Soft Materials Draped Over Objects: A Case Study of Intuitive Physics in Perception, Attention, and Memory

Abstract

We typically think of intuitive physics in terms of high-level cognition, but might aspects of physics also be extracted during lower-level visual processing? Might we not only think about physics, but also see it? We explored this using multiple tasks in online adult samples with objects covered by soft materials—as when you see a chair with a blanket draped over it—where you must account for the physical interactions between cloth, gravity, and object. In multiple change-detection experiments ( n = 200), observers from an online testing marketplace were better at detecting image changes involving underlying object structure versus those involving only the superficial folds of cloths—even when the latter were more extreme along several dimensions. And in probe-comparison experiments ( n = 100), performance was worse when both probes (vs. only one) appeared on image regions reflective of underlying object structure (equating visual properties). This work collectively shows how vision uses intuitive physics to recover the deeper underlying structure of scenes.

Temporal segmentation and ‘look ahead’ simulation: Physical events structure visual perception of intuitive physics

“…Yet, in many ways, most previous research on intuitive physics has focused on only half of this structure: representations of physical objects. Among others, these studies have illustrated the perception of physical stability of object configurations (Battaglia et al, 2013;Pramod et al, 2022), whether an object is heavier or harder than others (Hamrick et al, 2016;Schwettmann et al, 2019;Guo et al, 2020), and how intuitive physics may be recruited for object perception (Wong et al, 2022). Yet, physical scenes inherently unfold over time, expressing discrete temporal structure in demarcated episodes of object interactions, including collision, bouncing, toppling, falling, and entering and exiting containers.…”