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Many models of intuitive physical reasoning posit some kind of mental simulation mechanism, yet everyday environments frequently contain far more objects than people could plausibly represent with their limited cognitive capacity. What determines which objects are actually included in our representations? We asked participants to predict how a ball will bounce through a complex field of obstacles, and probed working memory for objects in the scene that were more and less likely to be relevant to the ball’s trajectory. We evaluate different accounts of relevance and find that successful object memory is best predicted by how frequently a ball’s trajectory is expected to contact that object under a probabilistic simulation model. This suggests that people construct representations for mental simulation efficiently and dynamically, on the fly, by adding objects “just in time”: only when they are expected to become relevant for the next stage of simulation.
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Melting Ice With Your Mind: Representational Momentum for Physical States
When a log burns, it transforms from a block of wood into a pile of ash. Such state changes are among the most dramatic ways objects change, going beyond mere changes of position or orientation. How does the mind represent changes of state? A foundational result in visual cognition is that memory extrapolates the positions of moving objects—a distortion called representational momentum. Here, five experiments ( N = 400 adults) exploited this phenomenon to investigate mental representations in state space. Participants who viewed objects undergoing state changes (e.g., ice melting, logs burning, or grapes shriveling) remembered them as more changed (e.g., more melted, burned, or shriveled) than they actually were. This pattern extended to several types of state changes, went beyond their low-level properties, and even adhered to their natural trajectories in state space. Thus, mental representations of objects actively incorporate how they change—not only in their relation to their environment, but also in their essential qualities.
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- PAR ID:
- 10371234
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0956-7976
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 725-735
- Size(s):
- p. 725-735
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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