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How people reason about the mechanics of the physical world is an important question for several different cognitive sciences. Education, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology have each conducted large numbers of studies over the last several decades, largely in isolation from one another (especially in the last quarter century). The results have suggested that cognitive mechanics may be subserved by a number of mechanisms that are differentially involved in different tasks. Here, we report converging results from factor analysis of a large compendium of mechanics questions. 

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Vir- tual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which re- searchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such represen- tations. We find that this method forces researchers to take a god’s-eye view when describing dynamical relationships be- tween entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and con- cept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers’ minds. We conclude with some further key advan- tages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and lin- guistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly. 

Cognitive science has evolved since early disputes between radical empiricism and radical nativism. The authors are reacting to the revival of radical empiricism spurred by recent successes in deep neural network (NN) models. We agree that language-like mental representations (language-of-thoughts [LoTs]) are part of the best game in town, but they cannot be understood independent of the other players.