Physical Reasoning
From pouring a cup of coffee to playing frogger through the streets, physical reasoning is ubiquitous in human behavior. Arguably these goals have been stable throughout the evolution of our species, so are we optimal physical reasoners?
Primary Readings
Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss:
| McCloskey, M. (1983) | Intuitive physics. Scientific American, 248(4), 122-131. |
| Battaglia, P. W., Hamrick, J. B., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2013) | Simulation as an engine of physical scene understanding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(45), 18327-18332. |
Secondary Readings
The presenter should read and incorporate these:
| Ludwin-Peery, E., Bramley, N. R., Davis, E., & Gureckis, T. M. (2020) | Broken physics: A conjunction fallacy effect in intuitive physical reasoning. Psychological Science, 31 (12), 1602-1611.The article investigates the conjunction fallacy in our ability to reason about physical events. Three experiments were conducted, and the results consistently showed that participants rated conjunction of two physical events as more likely than at least one of the constituent events in the same scenes. This raises questions about current theories of mental simulation in physical reasoning. Relating to the primary readings, does this fit better with McCloskey’s view that physical reasoning is based on heuristic rules, or Battaglia et al’s view that it is based on detailed simulations? |
| Gerstenberg, T., Goodman, N. D., Lagnado, D. A., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2021). | A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments for physical events. Psychological Review, 128(5), 936.This article discusses the Counterfactual Simulation Model (CSM) and its application in understanding causal judgments in physical events. The CSM aims to predict how people make causal judgments by comparing what actually happened with what could have happened. The model is tested in experiments and provides a better fit than heuristic models. It captures different aspects of causation and can be used to model the semantics of causal verbs. Relating to the Causality topic, what rung of causal reasoning is this? |
Questions under discussion
- How do humans represent physical knowledge and use that knowledge to achieve their goals?
- Are we optimal physical reasoners?
