Séminaire - Tomer Ullman : How Do Humans Develop a Simplified Model of Objects and Their Physics?

Stanislas Dehaene


Collège de France - Année 2023-2024


Chaire de Psychologie Cognitive Expérimentale


Quel code neural pour les représentations mentales ?


Séminaire - Tomer Ullman : How Do Humans Develop a Simplified
Model of Objects and Their Physics?


Tomer Ullman, Harvard University


Résumé


People seem to have an early understanding of the world around
them, and the other people in it. Before children can reliably
say "ball", "wall", or "Saul", they expect balls to not go
through walls, and for Saul to go right for a ball (if there's no
wall). There are different proposals out there for the cognitive
computations that underlie this basic commonsense reasoning. I'll
focus on one proposal in particular, and suggest that a "rough
rendering and de-rendering" approach can explain basic
expectations about object solidity, cohesion, and permanence. I
will also expand the notion of approximations in intuitive
physics to more recent work on imagery and imagination, including
non-commitment in imagery, and the importance of physical
properties in visual pretense.