Naive Physics Research Articles

Intuitive physics and intuitive psychology (“theory of mind”) in offspring of mothers with psychoses

Offspring of individuals with psychoses sometimes display an abnormal development of cognition, language, motor performance, social adaptation, and emotional functions. The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of children of mothers with schizophrenia (n = 28) and bipolar disorder (n = 23) to understand mental states of others using the Eyes Test (folk psychology or “theory of mind”) and physical causal interactions of inanimate objects (folk physics). Compared with healthy controls (n = 29), the children of mothers with schizophrenia displayed significantly impaired performances on the Eyes Test but not on the folk physics test when corrected for IQ. The children of mothers with bipolar disorder did not differ from the controls. The folk physics test showed a significant covariance with IQ, whereas the Eyes Test did not exhibit such covariance. These results suggest that the attribution of mental states, but not the interpretation of causal interaction of objects, is impaired in offspring of individuals with schizophrenia, which may contribute to social dysfunctions.

Physics Curriculum for the 21st Century

In this paper we argue that, in Kuhn's term, phenomenological thermodynamics and Newtonian physics are incommensurable, while phenomenological thermodynamics, naive physics and Aristotelian physics are commensurable paradigms. Teaching based on phenomenological thermodynamics eliminates the incommensurability problem. Also, a physics curriculum based on phenomenological thermodynamics is outlined, in which Newtonian equations are introduced only at a later stage, as a well-working model of the world.

Towards Robust Task Execution for Domestic Service Robots

In the field of domestic service robots, recovery from faults is crucial to promote user acceptance. In this context we will focus, in particular, on some specific faults which arise from interaction of the robot with its real world environment. In these situations even a well modelled robot may fail to perform its tasks successfully due to external faults which occur while interacting. We reason along the most frequent failures in typical scenarios which we have observed in real-world demonstrations and competitions using the autonomous service robot Jenny. We propose four different fault classes caused by disturbances, imperfect perception, inadequate planning or chaining of action sequences. The faults are first classified and then mapped to a small number of fault handling techniques partly known, partly extended by us. In addition to existing techniques we present two approaches to handle external faults from inadequate descriptions of the planner operator class. The first approach uses naive physics concepts to find information about detected external faults. The second approach is simulation based, utilising a single simulation that shows a manipulated object's behaviour for successfully completing an action. The approach uses the N-Bins learning algorithm to suggest a releasing state of the object that avoids the occurrence of external faults. We apply the proposed approaches to the scenarios where a robot performs the pick-and-place manipulation tasks. The results of these applications show that both approaches hold great promises for handling external faults in domestic service robotics.

How Robust Are Probabilistic Models of Higher-Level Cognition?

An increasingly popular theory holds that the mind should be viewed as a near-optimal or rational engine of probabilistic inference, in domains as diverse as word learning, pragmatics, naive physics, and predictions of the future. We argue that this view, often identified with Bayesian models of inference, is markedly less promising than widely believed, and is undermined by post hoc practices that merit wholesale reevaluation. We also show that the common equation between probabilistic and rational or optimal is not justified.

Conceptual Change from the Framework Theory Side of the Fence

We describe the main principles of the framework theory approach to conceptual change and briefly report on the results of a text comprehension study that investigated some of the hypotheses that derive from it. We claim that children construct a naive physics which is based on observation in the context of lay culture and which forms a relatively coherent conceptual system—i.e., a framework theory—that can be used as a basis for explanation and prediction of everyday phenomena. Learning science requires fundamental ontological, epistemological, and representational changes in naive physics. These conceptual changes take a long time to be achieved, giving rise to fragmentation and synthetic conceptions. We also argue that both fragmentation and synthetic conceptions can be explained to result from learners’ attempts assimilate scientific information into their existing but incompatible naive physics.

A Process Ontology

The paper assumes that to be of practical interest process must be understood as physical action that takes place in the world rather than being an idea in the mind. It argues that if an ontology of process is to accommodate actuality, it must be represented in terms of relative probabilities. Folk physics cannot accommodate this, and so the paper appeals to scientific culture because it is an emergent knowledge of the world derived from action in it. Process is represented as a contradictory probability distribution that does not depend on a spatio-temporal frame. An actuality is a probability density that grounds the values of probabilities to constitute their distributions. Because probability is a conserved value, probability distributions are subject to the constraint of symmetry and must be zero-sum. An actuality is locked-in by other actualities to become a zero-sum symmetry of probability values. It is shown that the locking-in of actualities constructs spatio-temporal locality, lends actualities specificity, and makes them a contradiction. Localization is the basis for understanding empirical observation. Because becoming depends on its construction of being, processes exist as trajectories. The historical trajectories of evolution and revolution as well as the non-historical trajectory of strong emergence are how processes are observed to exist.

Perception in autism: An interactive global research between folk psychology and folk physics.

Perception in autism: An interactive global research between folk psychology and folk physics.

Examining the relationship between Autism spectrum disorders and technical professions in high functioning adults

A relationship has been hypothesized between Autism and technical professions. This has been attributed to superior folk physics in individuals with Autism. Folk physics can be described as the capability to understand physical causality. Since all the previous studies in this area were focused on family members of individuals with Autism, it was unclear if there is a direct relationship between Autism and technical professions. Therefore, we examined the degree to which the professions of high functioning adults with Autism (N=29) encompass technical skills and compared the results to adults with Schizophrenia (N=17) and a neurotypical control group (N=30). Furthermore, we examined whether the degree of technical skills in the professions of the Autism group was related to their autistic traits. The results showed that the last and longest attained professions of the adults with Autism require more technical skills than those of the Schizophrenia and neurotypical group. Furthermore, the degree of technical skills in the professions of the adults with Autism is related to impairments in social skills, but not to strengths in detailed information processing.

Phenomenal Causality II: Integration and Implication

The empirical literature on phenomenal causality (the notion that causality can be perceived) is reviewed. Different potential types of phenomenal causality and variables that influence phenomenal causality were considered in Part I (Hubbard 2012b) of this two-part series. In Part II, broader questions regarding properties of phenomenal causality and connections of phenomenal causality to other perceptual or cognitive phenomena (different types of phenomenal causality, effects of spatial and temporal variance, phenomenal causality in infancy, effects of object properties, naive physics, spatial localization, other illusions, amodal completion, Gestalt principles of perceptual grouping, effects of context, differences between physical and social causality, effects of learning and experience, individual differences, effects of predictability, asymmetry in phenomenal causality, differences between perceived causality and perceived force, phenomenal causality in nonhuman animals) are considered. Potential mechanisms of phenomenal causality (inference from contiguity, a priori understanding, ampliation, perceptual learning, stimulus activity, beliefs regarding kinematics, haptic experience, beliefs regarding impetus, postdiction, innateness, modularity, specific neural structures) are also considered.

Categorization of Alternative Conceptions in Electricity and Magnetism: the Case of Ethiopian Undergraduate Students

The purpose of this study was to categorize 35 Ethiopian undergraduate physics students’ alternative conceptions in the concepts of electric potential and energy. A descriptive qualitative research design was used to categorize the students’ alternative conceptions. Four independently homogeneous ability focus groups were formed to elicit the students’ conceptual perceptions. A five-stage thematic (categorical) framework analysis—familiarization, identifying a thematic framework, coding, charting, and interpretation—was made to analyze data of the focus group discussions. The categories of alternative conceptions were based on the students’ epistemological and ontological descriptions of the concepts investigated. Consequently, the following categories were diagnosed: naive physics, lateral alternative conceptions, ontological alternative conceptions, Ohm’s phenomenological primitives, mixed conceptions, and loose ideas. The extensiveness of the alternative conceptions from the epistemological and ontological perspectives was comparable and considerable. The naive physics and lateral alternative conceptions were more extensive than the others. The alternative conceptions were less frequently and inconsistently revealed within and across the categories. In general, it was concluded that the categories have common characteristics of diversified distribution of alternative conceptions and multiple alternative conceptions of specific concepts within and across the categories. Finally, instructional and theoretical implications are forwarded.

Chimpanzee ‘folk physics’: bringing failures into focus

Differences between individuals are the raw material from which theories of the evolution and ontogeny of cognition are built. For example, when 4-year-old children pass a test requiring them to communicate the content of another's falsely held belief, while 3-year-olds fail, we know that something must change over the course of the third year of life. In the search for what develops or evolves, the typical route is to probe the extents and limits of successful individuals' ability. Another is to focus on those that failed, and find out what difference or lack prevented them from passing the task. Recent research in developmental psychology has harnessed individual differences to illuminate the cognitive mechanisms that emerge to enable success. We apply this approach to explaining some of the failures made by chimpanzees when using tools to solve problems. Twelve of 16 chimpanzees failed to discriminate between a complete and a broken tool when, after being set down, the ends of the broken one were aligned in front of them. There was a correlation between performance on this aligned task and another in which after being set down, the centre of both tools was covered, suggesting that the limiting factor was not the representation of connection, but memory or attention. Some chimpanzees that passed the aligned task passed a task in which the location of the broken tool was never visible but had to be inferred.

How Do Children Solve Aesop's Fable?

Studies on members of the crow family using the “Aesop's Fable” paradigm have revealed remarkable abilities in these birds, and suggested a mechanism by which associative learning and folk physics may interact when learning new problems. In the present study, children between 4 and 10 years of age were tested on the same tasks as the birds. Overall the performance of the children between 5–7-years was similar to that of the birds, while children from 8-years were able to succeed in all tasks from the first trial. However the pattern of performance across tasks suggested that different learning mechanisms might be being employed by children than by adult birds. Specifically, it is possible that in children, unlike corvids, performance is not affected by counter-intuitive mechanism cues.

In Mysterious Ways: On petitionary prayer and subtle forms of supernatural causation

The psychology of prayer and supernatural causation has received surprisingly little attention from empirical researchers. This paper discusses implicit belief patterns about the causal mechanisms by which God effects changes in the world. The authors offer a psychological account of belief in supernatural causation based on the existing empirical literature on petitionary prayer, incorporating mechanisms of psychological self-correction and rationalisation, confirmation bias and folk physics. They propose that religious believers ‘prefer’ modes of divine action that are subtle and indistinguishable from the natural course of events: given that the causal structure of our world is partly inscrutable, beliefs in subtle and unascertainable modes of supernatural causation will be compelling and cognitively appealing because they are more susceptible to occasional confirmation and less vulnerable to repeated disconfirmation. In other words, believers who request supernatural interventions that are subtle and indistinguishable from the natural course of events will have a better chance of finding themselves in a situation in which they can attribute the events in question to God answering their prayers. The authors argue that such individual psychological factors play a role in the cultural transmission of prayer practices as well, leading to culturally widespread beliefs in subtle forms of supernatural causation.

Your Actions in My Cerebellum: Subclinical Deficits in Action Observation in Patients with Unilateral Chronic Cerebellar Stroke

Empirical evidence indicates that cognitive consequences of cerebellar lesions tend to be mild and less important than the symptoms due to lesions to cerebral areas. By contrast, imaging studies consistently report strong cerebellar activity during tasks of action observation and action understanding. This has been interpreted as part of the automatic motor simulation process that takes place in the context of action observation. The function of the cerebellum as a sequencer during executed movements makes it a good candidate, within the framework of embodied cognition, for a pivotal role in understanding the timing of action sequences. Here, we investigated a cohort of eight patients with chronic, first-ever, isolated, ischemic lesions of the cerebellum. The experimental task consisted in identifying a plausible sequence of pictures from a randomly ordered group of still frames extracted from (a) a complex action performed by a human actor ("biological action" test) or (b) a complex physical event occurring to an inanimate object ("folk physics" test). A group of 16 healthy participants was used as control. The main result showed that cerebellar patients performed significantly worse than controls in both sequencing tasks, but performed much worse in the "biological action" test than in the "folk physics" test. The dissociation described here suggests that observed sequences of simple motor acts seem to be represented differentially from other sequences in the cerebellum.

Comprehension of functional support by enculturated chimpanzees Pan troglodytes

Abstract Studies of causal understanding of tool relationships in captive chimpanzees have yielded disparate findings, particularly those reported by Povinelli & colleagues (2000) for tool tasks by laboratory chimpanzees. The present set of experiments tested nine enculturated chimpanzees on three versions of a support task, as described by Povinelli (2000), during which food rewards were presented in different experimental configurations. In Experiment 1, stimulus pairs included a choice between a cloth with a reward on the upper right corner or with a second reward off the cloth, adjacent to a corner, with the second pair comprised of a cloth with food on the upper right corner, and a second cloth with the reward on the substrate, partially covered. All subjects were successful with both test conditions in Experiment 1. In a second study, the experimental choices included one of two possible correct options, paired with one of three incorrect options, with the three incorrect choices all involving varying degrees of perceptual containment. All nine chimpanzees scored significantly above chance across all six conditions. In Experiment 3, four unique conditions were presented, combining one of two possible correct choices with one of two incorrect choices. Six of the subjects scored significantly above chance across the four conditions, and group performance on individual conditions was also significant. Superior performance was demonstrated by female subjects in Experiment 3, similar to sex differences in tool use previously reported for wild chimpanzees and some tool tasks in captive chimpanzees. The present results for Experiments 2 & 3 were significantly differed from those reported by Povinelli et al. (2000) for laboratory-born, peer-reared chimpanzees. One contribution towards the dramatic differences between the two study populations may be the significant rearing and housing differences of the chimpanzee groups. One explanation is that under conditions of enculturation, rich social interactions with humans and conspecifics, as well as active exploration of artifacts, materials, and other aspects of their physical environment had a significant impact on the animals’ ability to recognize the support relationships among the stimulus choices. Overall, the present findings provide strong support for the hypothesis that our chimpanzee subjects based their responses on an understanding of functional support which represented one facet of their folk physics repertoire.

Can Science Change our Notion of Existence?

I explore the question of whether scientific changes can induce mutations in our ordinary notion of existence. I conclude that they can’t, partially on the grounds that some of the proposed alternative-notions of existence are only terminologically-distinct from our ordinary notion, and so don’t provide genuine metaphysical alternatives, and partially on the grounds that the ordinary notion of existence is criterion-transcendent. 1. It’s a truism that science discovers things about the world we live in that we didn’t expect (that we didn’t even see coming). Certainly the science of the early modern period did just that: that our sun is only one among the stars, that other planets have moons, that there are micro-organisms too small for the naked eye to see; and science was both acclaimed and reviled as a result. Nearly as much of a truism, as the one about science discovering new things, is that science transforms the inherited concepts of ordinary life. We have ordinary ideas about motion, roughly encapsulated in Aristotelian physics, perhaps belonging to a folk-physics that’s conceptually innate (in some sense of “conceptually innate”).1 These concepts were drastically transformed by Newton. More recently, most of the popular literature of physics has been motivated by attempts to communicate to ordinary people drastically-changed notions of space and time, shape and velocity, as much perhaps as it has been motivated by the desire to present what the world we live in is actually like. Philosophers, of course, worry about whether basic notions of causality and identity scale down to the quantum level; and many argue that they don’t. Are all of our concepts open to mutation from empirical pressure? Quine thought that this was even true of the concept of existence. Having attached our concept of existence to the first-order quantifier, he serenely contemplated the possibility of a future shift in logic accompanied by a shift in quantifierapparatus, or even a replacement of the quantifiers altogether with something else far too alien to allow ontology to survive. Logic for Quine was open to mutation; so, therefore, he thought, are all the concepts dependent on its structure. 1 Pylyshyn (2003, 282, footnote 1) notes then unpublished work of Ian Howard that seems to show “that people’s naive physics, as measured by their predictions of falling objects, conformed to Aristotelian rather than Newtonian or Galilean principles.”

Editorial: Folk Epistemology. The Cognitive Bases of Epistemic Evaluation

Folk epistemology refers to a range of cognitive skills that involve epistemic concepts such as knowledge and truth. As human beings we are able to assess the truth of an utterance by another agent or whether an inference someone makes is valid. We can evaluate to what extent sources we acquire information from are reliable and whether new information we acquire should lead to belief revision. We consistently produce, in particular, epistemic evaluations. We can judge, for instance, that: “p is true”, “it is probable that p”, “A is justified in thinking that p”, “B is trustworthy when she says that p”, or “C is lying”. Epistemology is the normative study of how such epistemic evaluations should be made. By contrast, the study of folk epistemology focuses on epistemic evaluations that people actually make and on the processes that produce them. It is a descriptive research project on the beliefs and intuitions people have about knowledge, truth, reasons and other epistemic notions, as well as a research project on the psychological and cognitive processes that sustain them. We use the term “folk epistemology” to specify that the scope of this notion is not just epistemology as traditionally understood by philosophers, but the epistemology that reflects how people make epistemic evaluations; the term “folk” also refers to an established tradition in psychology that investigates “naive” or “folk” theories that ground the cognition of specific domains: folk physics, for instance, as the cognition of physical objects, or folk psychology, as the cognitive ability to ascribe intentions, beliefs and desires to others. Research on folk epistemology, or folk epistemologies, spans the study of the form and content of epistemic evaluations, as well as their cognitive underpinnings. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2010) 1:477–482 DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0046-8

The Naive Physics Curvilinear Impetus Bias does not Occur for Locomotion

The Naive Physics Curvilinear Impetus Bias does not Occur for Locomotion

Time-to-passage judgments reflect naive physics: The cases of representational gravity and friction

Time-to-passage judgments reflect naive physics: The cases of representational gravity and friction

Continuous (r)evolutions: Thermodynamic processes, analog hybridization, transversal becomings and the post-human

In a land far, far away, there wander analog hybridizations. In this story, guided by the theory, aesthetics and methodology of transversal poetics, we adventure to some previously explored and unexplored territories in the Xanadu of which this land appears. Marvelous encounters with folk physics, evolutionary theory, neuronal activity and massive energy storms glitter our journey. These encounters lead us across boundless spacetime, through kaleidoscopic variations on the post-human, and beyond established parameters for conceptual and practical differentiations in particles, processes, species and consciousnesses. We experience, become, and come-to-be super creatures, and pause not with conclusion, but rather with incentive for further fugitive explorations and transversality.