Looking into the past: Eye-tracking mental simulation in physical inference

Abstract

Mental simulation is a powerful cognitive capacity that underlies people’s ability to draw inferences about what happened in the past from the present. Recent work suggests that eye-tracking can be used as a window through which one can study the process of mental simulation in intuitive physics tasks. In our experiment, participants have to figure out in which of three holes a ball was dropped in a virtual Plinko box. We develop a computational model of human intuitive physical reasoning in Plinko that runs repeated simulations in a noisy physics simulator in order to infer in which hole the ball was dropped. We evaluate our model’s behavior against multiple human data signals: trial judgments, response times, and eye-movement data. We find that a model that sequentially samples simulations while balancing uncertainty and reward best explains the patterns of participant behavior we observe in these three signals.

Publication
Beller A., Xu Y., Linderman S., Gerstenberg T. (2022). Looking into the past: Eye-tracking mental simulation in physical inference. In Cognitive Science Proceedings.
Date

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