Seeing Soft Materials Draped Over Objects: A Case Study of Intuitive Physics in Perception, Attention, and Memory

Abstract

We typically think of intuitive physics in terms of high-level cognition, but might aspects of physics also be extracted during lower-level visual processing? Might we not only think about physics, but also see it? We explored this using multiple tasks in online adult samples with objects covered by soft materials—as when you see a chair with a blanket draped over it—where you must account for the physical interactions between cloth, gravity, and object. In multiple change-detection experiments ( n = 200), observers from an online testing marketplace were better at detecting image changes involving underlying object structure versus those involving only the superficial folds of cloths—even when the latter were more extreme along several dimensions. And in probe-comparison experiments ( n = 100), performance was worse when both probes (vs. only one) appeared on image regions reflective of underlying object structure (equating visual properties). This work collectively shows how vision uses intuitive physics to recover the deeper underlying structure of scenes.

How do babies come to know what babies know?

“…But this trend in vision research goes far beyond the classical domains of core knowledge. Additional work, for example, has suggested that mid-level vision automatically and spontaneously extracts representations of causal history (i.e., of how objects came to look the way that they do; Chen & Scholl, 2016), soft-material intuitive physics (e.g., inferring the shape of objects under cloths; Wong, Bi, Soltani, Yildirim, & Scholl, 2023), and even unfinishedness (as when an object appears not to have ended its movement; Ongchoco, Wong, & Scholl, 2023). But competence involving such seemingly sophisticated domains is nowhere to be found in most characterizations of core knowledge.…”

Précis ofWhat Babies Know

“…But this trend in vision research goes far beyond the classical domains of core knowledge. Additional work, for example, has suggested that mid-level vision automatically and spontaneously extracts representations of causal history (i.e., of how objects came to look the way that they do; Chen & Scholl, 2016), soft-material intuitive physics (e.g., inferring the shape of objects under cloths; Wong, Bi, Soltani, Yildirim, & Scholl, 2023), and even unfinishedness (as when an object appears not to have ended its movement; Ongchoco, Wong, & Scholl, 2023). But competence involving such seemingly sophisticated domains is nowhere to be found in most characterizations of core knowledge.…”

“…On the other hand, WBK also provides several additional arguments against this view, which seem less compelling. Spelke suggests that some aspects of core knowledge cannot have perceptual origins because (a) core knowledge representations are abstract (p. xxi)but many aspects of mid-level vision also abstract over many surface variables (Scholl, 2007); (b) perception involves "detectable surfaces" rather than "the entities that those surfaces belong to" (p. 198)but recent work in mid-level vision argues for exactly the opposite view (Wong et al, 2023); and (c) core knowledge representations have a time-course that transcends momentary perception (p. 78)but at least some object-file representations in mid-level vision have been shown to persist throughout interruptions for at least 8 seconds, and possibly much longer (a result that was also explicitly motivated by connections to infant cognition; Noles, Scholl, & Mitroff, 2005). Some of the most recent discussions of core knowledge also still seem to veer away from the possibility of substantive connections to mid-level vision in other ways.…”

Grounding Intuitive Physics in Perceptual Experience

“…When physical constraints are violated, it can lead to the perception of animated, self-generated motion (Parovel 2023). Additionally, there is evidence suggesting that certain relatively complex relational properties of physical events are processed early by the visual system, preceding the involvement of higher-level cognitive processes (Hafri and Firestone 2021;Little and Firestone 2021;Wong et al 2023).…”