How do humans judge physical stability? A prevalent account emphasizes the mental simulation of physical events implemented by an intuitive physics engine in the mind. Here we test the extent to which the perceptual features of object geometry are sufficient for supporting judgments of falling direction. In all experiments, adults and children judged the falling direction of a tilted object and, across experiments, objects differed in the geometric features (i.e., geometric centroid, object height, base size and/or aspect ratio) relevant to the judgment. Participants' performance was compared to computational models trained on geometric features, as well as a deep convolutional neural network (ResNet-50), none of which incorporated mental simulation. Adult and child participants' performance was well fit by models of object geometry, particularly the geometric centroid. ResNet-50 also provided a good account of human performance. Altogether, our findings suggest that object geometry may be sufficient for judging the falling direction of tilted objects, independent of mental simulation.
Pubmed ID: 38242998 RIS Download
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scikit-learn: machine learning in Python
View all literature mentionsBlender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Because of the overwhelming success of the first open movie project, Ton Roosendaal, the Blender Foundation''s chairman, has established the Blender Institute. This now is the permanent office and studio to more efficiently organize the Blender Foundation goals, but especially to coordinate and facilitate Open Projects related to 3D movies, games or visual effects.
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