scholarly journals Limits on the Use of Simulation in Physical Reasoning

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Ludwin-Peery ◽  
Neil R Bramley ◽  
Ernest Davis ◽  
Todd Matthew Gureckis
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Conditions ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Conjunction Fallacy ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Physical Reasoning ◽  
Temporal Identity ◽  
Spatio Temporal

In this paper, we describe three experiments involving simple physical judgments and predictions, and argue their results are generally inconsistent with three core commitments of probabilistic mental simulation theory (PMST). The first experiment shows that people routinely fail to track the spatio-temporal identity of objects. The second experiment shows that people often incorrectly reverse the order of consequential physical events when making physical predictions. Finally, we demonstrate a physical version of the conjunction fallacy where participants rate the probability of two joint events as more likely to occur than a constituent event of that set. These results highlight the limitations or boundary conditions of simulation theory.

scholarly journals Limits on the Use of Simulation in Physical Reasoning

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Ludwin-Peery ◽  
Neil R Bramley ◽  
Ernest Davis ◽  
Todd Matthew Gureckis
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Conditions ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Conjunction Fallacy ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Physical Reasoning ◽  
Temporal Identity ◽  
Spatio Temporal

In this paper, we describe three experiments involving simple physical judgments and predictions, and argue their results are generally inconsistent with three core commitments of probabilistic mental simulation theory (PMST). The first experiment shows that people routinely fail to track the spatio-temporal identity of objects. The second experiment shows that people often incorrectly reverse the order of consequential physical events when making physical predictions. Finally, we demonstrate a physical version of the conjunction fallacy where participants rate the probability of two joint events as more likely to occur than a constituent event of that set. These results highlight the limitations or boundary conditions of simulation theory.

scholarly journals Partial Mental Simulation Explains Fallacies in Physical Reasoning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilona Bass ◽  
Kevin Smith ◽  
Elizabeth Bonawitz ◽  
Tomer David Ullman
Keyword(s):  
Simulation Model ◽  
Human Performance ◽  
Simulation Models ◽  
Conjunction Fallacy ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Physical Reasoning ◽  
The World ◽  
Computationally Expensive ◽  
Full Simulation

People can reason intuitively, efficiently, and accurately about everyday physical events. Recent accounts suggest that people use mental simulation to make such intuitive physical judgments. But mental simulation models are computationally expensive; how is physical reasoning relatively accurate, while maintaining computational tractability? We suggest that people make use of partial simulation, mentally moving forward in time only parts of the world deemed relevant. We propose a novel partial simulation model, and test it on the physical conjunction fallacy, a recently observed phenomenon (Ludwin-Peery, Bramley, Davis, & Gureckis, 2020) that poses a challenge for full simulation models. We find an excellent fit between our model's predictions and human performance on a set of scenarios that build on and extend those used by Ludwin-Peery et al. (2020), quantitatively and qualitatively accounting for a deviation from optimal performance. Our results suggest more generally how we allocate cognitive resources to efficiently represent and simulate physical scenes.

scholarly journals Broken Physics: A Conjunction-Fallacy Effect in Intuitive Physical Reasoning

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (12) ◽  
pp. 1602-1611
Author(s):  
Ethan Ludwin-Peery ◽  
Neil R. Bramley ◽  
Ernest Davis ◽  
Todd M. Gureckis
Keyword(s):  
Conjunction Fallacy ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Single Event ◽  
Physical Reasoning ◽  
Conjunction Errors ◽  
Intuitive Physics ◽  
Logical Impossibility ◽  
Rule Out

One remarkable aspect of human cognition is our ability to reason about physical events. This article provides novel evidence that intuitive physics is subject to a peculiar error, the classic conjunction fallacy, in which people rate the probability of a conjunction of two events as more likely than one constituent (a logical impossibility). Participants viewed videos of physical scenarios and judged the probability that either a single event or a conjunction of two events would occur. In Experiment 1 ( n = 60), participants consistently rated conjunction events as more likely than single events for the same scenes. Experiment 2 ( n = 180) extended these results to rule out several alternative explanations. Experiment 3 ( n = 100) generalized the finding to different scenes. This demonstration of conjunction errors contradicts claims that such errors should not appear in intuitive physics and presents a serious challenge to current theories of mental simulation in physical reasoning.

scholarly journals MULTI-DIMENSIONAL ERROR ANALYSIS OF NEARSHORE WAVE MODELING TOOLS, WITH APPLICATION TOWARD DATA-DRIVEN BOUNDARY CORRECTION

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (32) ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Boyang Jiang ◽  
James Kaihatu
Keyword(s):  
Boundary Conditions ◽  
Initial Boundary ◽  
Temporal Analysis ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Modeling Tools ◽  
Dimensional Error ◽  
Lateral Boundary Conditions ◽  
Boundary Information ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Spatio Temporal

As the forecasting models become more sophisticated in their physics and possible depictions of the nearshore hydrodynamics, they also become increasingly sensitive to errors in the inputs, such as errors in the specification of boundary information (lateral boundary conditions, initial boundary conditions, etc). Evaluation of the errors on the boundary is less straightforward, and is the subject of this study. The model under investigation herein is the Delft3D modeling suite, developed at Deltares (formerly Delft Hydraulics) in Delft, the Netherlands. Coupling of the wave (SWAN) and hydrodynamic (FLOW) model requires care at the lateral boundaries in order to balance run time and error growth. To this extent, we will use perturbation method and spatio-temporal analysis method such as Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) analysis to determine the various scales of motion in the flow field and the extent of their response to imposed boundary errors.

scholarly journals Limits on Simulation Approaches in Intuitive Physics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Ludwin-Peery ◽  
Neil R Bramley ◽  
Ernest Davis ◽  
Todd Matthew Gureckis
Keyword(s):  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Simulation Approach ◽  
Apparent Contradiction ◽  
Physical Reasoning ◽  
Human Ability ◽  
Intuitive Physics

A popular explanation of the human ability for physical reasoning is that it depends on a sophisticated ability to perform mental simulations. According to this perspective, physical reasoning problems are approached by repeatedly simulating relevant aspects of a scenario, with noise, and making judgments based on aggregation over these simulations. In this paper, we describe three core tenets of simulation approaches, theoretical commitments that must be present in order for a simulation approach to be viable. The identification of these tenets threatens the plausibility of simulation as a theory of physical reasoning, because they appear to be incompatible with what we know about cognition more generally. To investigate this apparent contradiction, we describe three experiments involving simple physical judgments and predictions, and argue their results challenge these core predictions of theories of mental simulation.

Simulation theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Davis ◽  
Tony Stone
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Psychological Practice ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Mental Resources

Mental simulation is the simulation, replication or re-enactment, usually in imagination, of the thinking, decision-making, emotional responses or other aspects of the mental life of another person. According to simulation theory, mental simulation in imagination plays a key role in our everyday psychological understanding of other people. The same mental resources that are used in our own thinking, decision-making or emotional responses are redeployed in imagination to provide an understanding of the thoughts, decisions or emotions of another. Simulation theory stands opposed to the ’ theory theory’ of folk psychology. According to the theory theory, everyday psychological understanding depends on deployment of an empirical theory or body of information about psychological matters, such as how people normally think, make decisions or respond emotionally. Simulation theory does not altogether deny that third-personal psychological knowledge is implicated in our folk psychological practice, prediction, interpretation and explanation. But it maintains that, over a range of cases, the first-personal methodology of mental simulation allows us to avoid the need for detailed antecedent knowledge about how psychological processes typically operate.

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