{"pk":26913,"title":"Consistent Probabilistic Simulation UnderlyingHuman Judgment in Substance Dynamics","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A growing body of evidence supports the hypothesis that hu-mans infer future states of perceived physical situations bypropagating noisy representations forward in time using ratio-nal (approximate) physics. In the present study, we examinewhether humans are able to predict (1) the resting geometryof sand pouring from a funnel and (2) the dynamics of threesubstances—liquid, sand, and rigid balls—flowing past obsta-cles into two basins. Participants’ judgments in each experi-ment are consistent with simulation results from the intuitivesubstance engine (ISE) model, which employs a Material PointMethod (MPM) simulator with noisy inputs. The ISE outper-forms ground-truth physical models in each situation, as wellas two data-driven models. The results reported herein expandon previous work proposing human use of mental simulation inphysical reasoning and demonstrate human proficiency in pre-dicting the dynamics of sand, a substance that is less commonin daily life than liquid or rigid objects.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Intuitive physics; mental simulation; substancerepresentation; prediction"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/08c7w7hm","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"James","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kubricht","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""},{"first_name":"Yixin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""},{"first_name":"Chenfanfu","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jiang","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""},{"first_name":"Demetri","middle_name":"","last_name":"Terzopoulos","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""},{"first_name":"Song-Chun","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""},{"first_name":"Hongjing","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26913/galley/16549/download/"}]}