{"pk":25753,"title":"Prospective uncertainty: The range of possible futures in physical predictions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Recent research has suggested that people make physical\npredictions based on extrapolation from a noisy representation\nof the world, which gives rise to a probabilistic distribution\nover possible future worlds. But can people use the\nuncertainty of their predictions to inform their decisions, or\ncan people access only a single possible future? Here we\ndemonstrate that confidence-sensitive decisions about the\nfuture track the amount of uncertainty expected from\nprobabilistic forward extrapolations. Participants were asked\nto make predictions about where a ball would go and indicate\nan expected range around that prediction. This range was well\ncorrelated with two measures of uncertainty: variability in\npredictions across participants and the amount of uncertainty\nexpected by a model of physical prediction. This suggests that\npeople form a probabilistic distribution over possible futures\nin the course of physical prediction and base their decisions\nabout the future on this range.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"prediction; uncertainty; physical reasoning; noisy\nNewton physics"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mb5p73k","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Kevin","middle_name":"A","last_name":"Smithson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Edward","middle_name":"","last_name":"Vul","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25753/galley/15377/download/"}]}