Abstract
Our intuitive understanding of physical dynamics is crucial in daily life. When we fill a coffee cup, stack items in a refrigerator, or navigate around a slippery patch of ice, we draw on our intuitions about how physical interactions will unfold. What mental machinery underlies our ability to form such inferences? Numerous aspects of cognition must contribute - for example, spatial thinking, temporal prediction, and working memory, to name a few. Is intuitive physics merely the sum of its parts - a collection of these and other related abilities that we apply to physical scenarios as we would to other tasks? Or does physical reasoning rest on something extra - a devoted set of mental resources that takes information from other cognitive systems as inputs? Here, we take a key step in addressing this question by relating individual differences on a physical prediction task to performance on spatial tasks, which may be most likely to account for intuitive physics abilities given the fundamentally spatial nature of physical interactions. To what degree can physical prediction performance be disentangled from spatial thinking? We tested 100 online participants in an “Unstable Towers” task and measures of spatial cognition and working memory. We found a positive relationship between intuitive physics and spatial skills, but there were substantial, reliable individual differences in physical prediction ability that could not be accounted for by spatial measures or working memory. Our findings point toward the separability of intuitive physics from spatial cognition.
Highlights
Our ability to interpret and predict the physical dynamics of a scene is crucial in everyday life
After developing a set of Unstable Towers stimuli that could reliably capture individual differences in physical prediction performance, we tested the relationship between this intuitive physics task and four other wellestablished measures of spatial reasoning and working memory
While our results show that spatial abilities are a significant predictor of performance on the towers task, we found reliable individual differences in physical inference abilities that could not be accounted for by either spatial abilities or working memory
Summary
Our ability to interpret and predict the physical dynamics of a scene is crucial in everyday life. To pick up a coffee cup with the correct force, stack a pile of dishes so that it will not fall, or grab a rebound after it bounces off of the rim, we must anticipate how objects will behave when they interact with each other and with our own bodies Our experience performing such tasks is not one of crunching the equations of Newtonian dynamics. It is possible that our physical intuitions arise purely from a collection of other mental systems working in concert - physical prediction may be just another kind of everyday challenge that we solve with the broad set of cognitive abilities at our disposal
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