Research

Engaging with our everyday environments requires an understanding of their physical structure and dynamics. In daily life, we continually assess how the objects around us rest on and support each other, how they could be acted on, and how they will behave when they fall, roll, or collide. We build up our physical intuitions with amazing speed, and with sufficient detail to guide precise actions. The research underway in our lab is aimed at revealing the mental processes behind our intuitive understanding of the physical world. We are working to characterize the computations carried out by the intuitive physics system and establish how intuitive physics interacts with other cognitive and perceptual processes.

Are there dedicated resources for intuitive physics in the mind?

Our recent and ongoing work has provided evidence for a mental physics engine that we recruit to reason about a wide variety of physical scenarios.

What operations compose the computational core of the intuitive physics system?

Are there mental algorithms devoted to processing specific events (e.g., collisions) or specific scene contents (e.g., rigid bodies vs. soft bodies, fluids, cloth, and others)?

How do intuitive physics abilities change with aging and experience?

Ongoing work in the lab is studying how extensive training in perceiving and predicting specific physical scenarios (e.g., planning a billiards shot or arranging plates on a service tray) leads to improvements in physical reasoning, and whether such improvements transfer to untrained tasks.

We are also tracking intuitive physics abilities over the lifespan using the Test of Intuitive Physics (TIP).

How does intuitive physics interact with perception, attention, and memory?