Reconciling intuitive and Newtonian physics
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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. Cristina Savin.
People have strong intuitions about the masses of objects and the
causal forces that they exert upon one another when they collide.
These intuitions appear to deviate from Newtonian physics, leading
researchers to conclude that people use a set of heuristics to make
judgments about collisions. However, people’s judgments about mass are
indeed consistent with Newtonian physics,
provided uncertainty about the velocities of the objects is take into
account. The resulting rational model of intuitive dynamics easily
extends to accommodate other aspects of people’s inferences about
physical causation, such as judgments of whether one object caused
another to move. I argue that intuition and physics need not be
divorced, and that a simple psychological process – stochastically
approximating Bayesian inference by recalling previous collisions –
can bring them together. This is one of several routes in which
process models can be derived as approximations to rational models.
This talk is part of the Computational Neuroscience series.
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Monday 26 September 2011, 16:00-17:00