Dissociating intuitive physics from intuitive psychology: Evidence from Williams syndrome

Dissociating intuitive physics from intuitive psychology: Evidence from Williams syndrome.

Prior work suggests that our understanding of how things work ("intuitive physics") and how people work ("intuitive psychology") are distinct domains of human cognition. Here we directly test the dissociability of these two domains by investigating knowledge of intuitive physics and intuitive psychology in adults with Williams syndrome (WS) - a genetic developmental disorder characterized by se...

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"...

Computational Models of Intuitive Physics

People have a powerful “physical intelligence” – an ability to infer physical properties of objects and predict future states in complex, dynamic scenes – which they use to interpret their surroundings, plan safe and effective actions, build and understand devices and machines, and communicate efficiently. For instance, you can choose where to place your coffee to prevent it from spilling, arra...

Sources of uncertainty in intuitive physics

Recent work suggests that people predict how objects interact in a manner consistent with Newtonian physics, but with additional uncertainty. However, the sources of uncertainty have not been examined. In this study, we measure perceptual noise in initial conditions and stochasticity in the physical model used to make predictions. Participants predicted the trajectory of a moving object through...

An Intuitive Markov Chain Lesson From Baseball