Abstract
AbstractOur 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.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Cognitive Neuroscience,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Reference61 articles.
1. Akaike, H. (1973). Information theory and an extension of the maximum likelihood principle. In Proc. 2nd Int. Symp. Information Theory (eds B. N. Petrov and F. Csáki ), pp. 267–281. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
2. Alvarez, G. A. (2011). Representing multiple objects as an ensemble enhances visual cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(3), 122–131.
3. Baillargeon, R. (1987). Young infants’ reasoning about the physical and spatial properties of a hidden object. Cognitive Development, 2(3), 179–200.
4. Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Cortese, M. J., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., … Treiman, R. (2007). The English lexicon project. Behavior Research Methods, 39(3), 445–459.
5. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Spong, A., Scahill, V., & Lawson, J. (2001). Are intuitive physics and intuitive psychology independent? A test with children with Asperger Syndrome. Journal of Developmental and Learning Disorders, 5(1), 47–78.
Cited by
13 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献