Mental Representation of Objects in Physical Reasoning

What is it about?

People interact with objects in the world in real-time, which requires mental shortcuts in physical reasoning. Color, shape, and texture help us tell apples from oranges. But when trying to reason about an apple hurled toward your face, you may not care that it is green, or shiny, or even that it is an apple. All that matters is how fast, heavy, and where the apple is. For all reasonable purposes, it might as well be an orange. We propose that a key physical mental shortcut is the simplification of fine-grained shapes into coarser bodies. Such simplified bodies explain novel results across several psychophysical tasks, including judgments of causality, time-to-collision, and change detection.

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Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

Why is it important?

People make fast and reasonable predictions about the physical behavior of everyday objects. To do so, people may use principled mental shortcuts, such as object simplification, similar to models developed by engineers for real-time physical simulations. People’s behavior across our experiments indicates that they rely on coarse mental representations of objects for physical reasoning. Our empirical and computational findings shed light on basic representations people use to understand everyday dynamics, and how these representations differ from those used for recognition.

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