3-091 - Critical Cues in Early Physical Reasoning

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Studies exploring infants’ physical reasoning suggest they understand interactions between solids and non-solids, such that liquid is penetrable by solid objects (Hespos, Ferry, & Rips, 2009), and that liquids or sand cannot pass through a solid surface. Findings also suggest that infants can generalize the properties of familiar fluids like water to unfamiliar analogues like glass beads (Hespos et al., 2016). What properties inform these intuitions? This symposium brings together studies that can build a more systematic understanding of what factors young children are sensitive to in physical reasoning.
Anderson, Hespos & Rips further test infant physical reasoning about substances, testing whether 5- to 6-month-olds can use their physical knowledge of substances to track sand from one or two streams to one or two piles. VanMarle, Mou & Seok explore the interactions between objects and nonsolids, finding that 15- to 16-month-olds can reason about whether sand should remain inside a container after manually exploring whether the container is perforated or solid.
Recent research has proposed that adult intuitive physics relies on a unified representation that generalizes across and solid and non-solid scenarios, and depends on hidden dynamic variables such as mass, force, friction and elasticity (Battaglia et al. 2013, Smith and Vul 2013. Ullman, Tenenbaum & Spelke examine whether children’s intuitive physics representations rely on these dynamic variables (e.g. mass and force) over visible (shape and contact). Children (3-5) watched scenes of object interactions and predicted object properties or behavior in each scenario.

Sub Unit

• Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Chair

• Erin Morgan Anderson, Northwestern University

Discussant

• Sandeep Prasada, City University of New York - Hunter College

Individual Presentations

• Infants’ physical reasoning about substances: Predicting whether sand should stay in or fall out - Presenting Author: Kristy vanMarle, University of Missouri - Columbia; Yi Mou, University of Missouri - Columbia; Jin H Seok, University of Missouri - Columbia; Lauren Schneider, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Five-month-old infants have expectations for how nonsolid substances transform and persist - Presenting Author: Erin Morgan Anderson, Northwestern University; Susan Hespos, Northwestern University; Lance Rips, Northwestern University

• Canonical Mass: Preschoolers Expectations of Dynamic Variables for Solid Objects - Presenting Author: Tomer Ullman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Joshua Tenenbaum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard University