Chapter 65-66 Flashcards
What is naive physics?
Our commonsense understanding of how the world will behave
When do children start getting expectations of how the world will behave?
A couple months after birth
What do Spelk et al. argue about how infants learn physical concepts?
They are born with innate knowledge of some basic principles, which helps them learn more advanced concepts
What are the three elements that make up our core knowledge of object representation?
- 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
What types of physical principles do infants fail to recognize, and thus must learn through experience?
Principles such as gravity and inertia
How do Baillageron et al. propose infants expand their physical knowledge?
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.
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
- curved
- straight
The fact that adults still make errors in inferring weights, trajectories, etc. indicates ______
Physical knowledge is acquired in an event-specific fashion
Studies find that it is easier for adults to infer physical properties when they ______, rather than ______
- make inferences using action (placing a bucket in the right place to catch a ball, etc.)
- describing their expectations
What is mental simulation
Playing out the outcome of a situation regarding physical dynamics mentally
What are the two ways humans might employ physical reasoning?
- Mental simulation
- Rule-based prediction
Where does current scientific evidence suggest naive physics takes place in the brain?
- Frontal cortex
- Parietal cortex
The brain regions used for physical inference appear to overlap with those used for ______
Action planning and tool use
What is apraxia?
Impairments following brain damage that affect the ability to perform meaningful gestures and execute the appropriate actions for particular tools
Why might the same brain regions be used for naive physics and action planning?
Action planning inherently requires physical prediction
The premotor cortex encodes _____ and the aIPS encodes _____
- object mass
- visual and somatosensory information about object size, shape, and orientation
What is motor simulation theory?
Imagining oneself acting is required to understand information in domains such as object recognition, language processing, and action understanding
The _____ may play a complementary role in physical prediction by _____
- Ventral temporal cortex
- Computing the object and scene attributes that form the basis for predictions
In humans and monkeys, information about objects’ material properties is encoded in the _____
Ventral visual pathway
Physical cognition may have a mutually inhibitory relationship with _____
Social cognition
Object-knowledge representations are found in ______
- Temporal cortex
- Frontal cortex
- Parietal cortex
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 _____
- places and large objects
- animals
- tools
What are three notions associated with domain distribution in the VOTC
- Bottom-up visual property account
- Amodal domain-specific property account
- Connectivity-constraint account
Results are most consistent with the ____ account for domain distribution in the VOTC
Connectivity-constraint
