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{
    "pk": 25411,
    "title": "Humans predict liquid dynamics using probabilistic simulation",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Liquids can splash, squirt, gush, slosh, soak, drip, drain,\ntrickle, pool, and be poured–complex behaviors that we can\neasily distinguish, imagine, describe, and, crucially, predict,\ndespite tremendous diversity among different liquids’ material\nand dynamical characteristics. This proficiency suggests the\nbrain has a sophisticated cognitive mechanism for reasoning\nabout liquids, yet to date there has been little effort to study this\nmechanism quantitatively or describe it computationally. Here\nwe find evidence that people’s reasoning about how liquids\nmove is consistent with a computational cognitive model based\non approximate probabilistic simulation. In a psychophysical\nexperiment, participants predicted how different liquids would\nflow around solid obstacles, and their judgments agreed with\nthose of a family of models in which volumes of liquid are\nrepresented as collections of interacting particles, within a dynamical\nfluid simulation. Our model explains people’s accuracy,\nand their predictions’ sensitivity to liquids of different\nviscosity. We also explored several models that did not involve\nsimulation, and found they could not account for the experimental\ndata as well. Our results are consistent with previous\nreports that people’s physical understanding of solid objects is\nbased on simulation, but extends this thesis to the more complex\nand unexplored domain of reasoning about liquids",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xc533j2",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Christopher",
            "middle_name": "J",
            "last_name": "Bates",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Iker",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Yildirim",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Joshua",
            "middle_name": "B",
            "last_name": "Tenenbaum",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Peter",
            "middle_name": "W",
            "last_name": "Battaglia",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2015-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25411/galley/15035/download/"
        }
    ]
}