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

Stanislas DehaeneCollège de France - Année 2023-2024Chaire de Psychologie Cognitive ExpérimentaleQuel code neural pour les représentations mentales ?Séminaire - Tomer Ullman : How Do Humans Develop a Simplified Model of Objects and Their Physics?Tomer Ullman, Harvard UniversityRésuméPeople 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.