Chapter 65-66

Question 1

What is naive physics?

Answer 1

Our commonsense understanding of how the world will behave

Question 2

When do children start getting expectations of how the world will behave?

Answer 2

A couple months after birth

Question 3

What do Spelk et al. argue about how infants learn physical concepts?

Answer 3

They are born with innate knowledge of some basic principles, which helps them learn more advanced concepts

Question 4

What are the three elements that make up our core knowledge of object representation?

Answer 4

• Cohesion: objects move as one connected unit
• Continuity: objects move along one connected path over time
• Contact: objects must touch in order to influence motion on one another

Question 5

What types of physical principles do infants fail to recognize, and thus must learn through experience?

Answer 5

Principles such as gravity and inertia

Question 6

How do Baillageron et al. propose infants expand their physical knowledge?

Answer 6

They engage in hypothesis-testing on objects which violate their current expectations. They learn new event categories (collision, containment) and variables (size, shape) and the relationship between them.

Question 7

Adults tend to expect a ball exiting a curved tube to follow a ______ path, but also believe a ____ path to be more natural when viewing it

Answer 7

• curved

- straight

Question 8

The fact that adults still make errors in inferring weights, trajectories, etc. indicates ______

Answer 8

Physical knowledge is acquired in an event-specific fashion

Question 9

Studies find that it is easier for adults to infer physical properties when they ______, rather than ______

Answer 9

• make inferences using action (placing a bucket in the right place to catch a ball, etc.)
• describing their expectations

Question 10

What is mental simulation

Answer 10

Playing out the outcome of a situation regarding physical dynamics mentally

Question 11

What are the two ways humans might employ physical reasoning?

Answer 11

• Mental simulation

- Rule-based prediction

Question 12

Where does current scientific evidence suggest naive physics takes place in the brain?

Answer 12

• Frontal cortex

- Parietal cortex

Question 13

The brain regions used for physical inference appear to overlap with those used for ______

Answer 13

Action planning and tool use

Question 14

What is apraxia?

Answer 14

Impairments following brain damage that affect the ability to perform meaningful gestures and execute the appropriate actions for particular tools

Question 15

Why might the same brain regions be used for naive physics and action planning?

Answer 15

Action planning inherently requires physical prediction

Question 16

The premotor cortex encodes _____ and the aIPS encodes _____

Answer 16

• object mass

- visual and somatosensory information about object size, shape, and orientation

Question 17

What is motor simulation theory?

Answer 17

Imagining oneself acting is required to understand information in domains such as object recognition, language processing, and action understanding

Question 18

The _____ may play a complementary role in physical prediction by _____

Answer 18

• Ventral temporal cortex

- Computing the object and scene attributes that form the basis for predictions

Question 19

In humans and monkeys, information about objects’ material properties is encoded in the _____

Answer 19

Ventral visual pathway

Question 20

Physical cognition may have a mutually inhibitory relationship with _____

Answer 20

Social cognition

Question 21

Object-knowledge representations are found in ______

Answer 21

• Temporal cortex
• Frontal cortex
• Parietal cortex

Question 22

For object representations in the VOTC, the medFG/PHG shows stronger sensitivity to _____, the lateral-posterior fusiform gyrus prefers _____, and the lateral occipitotemporal cortex prefers _____

Answer 22

• places and large objects
• animals
• tools

Question 23

What are three notions associated with domain distribution in the VOTC

Answer 23

• Bottom-up visual property account
• Amodal domain-specific property account
• Connectivity-constraint account

Question 24

Results are most consistent with the ____ account for domain distribution in the VOTC

Answer 24

Connectivity-constraint

Question 25

What does none of the accounts explain?

Answer 25

How some domains (places/tools) are still preferentially activated by sound/touch and some aren’t (animals)

Question 26

What is a potential explanation for why come domains only repsond to visual cues?

Answer 26

The different target systems have different relationships with the visual system