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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. 

Specific features of visual objects innately draw approach responses in animals, and provide natural signals of potential reward. However, visual sampling behaviours and the detection of salient, rewarding stimuli are context and behavioural state-dependent and it remains unclear how visual perception and orienting responses change with specific expectations. To start to address this question, we employed a virtual stimulus orienting paradigm based on prey capture to quantify the conditional expression of visual stimulus-evoked innate approaches in freely moving mice. We found that specific combinations of stimulus features selectively evoked innate approach or freezing responses when stimuli were unexpected. We discovered that prey capture experience, and therefore the expectation of prey in the environment, selectively modified approach frequency, as well as altered those visual features that evoked approach. Thus, we found that mice exhibit robust and selective orienting responses to parameterized visual stimuli that can be robustly and specifically modified via natural experience. This work provides critical insight into how natural appetitive behaviours are driven by both specific features of visual motion and internal states that alter stimulus salience.