Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Accounts of human physical reasoning based on simulationfrom a noisy physics engine have enjoyed considerable suc-cess in recent years. However, simulating complex physicaldynamics can be a computationally expensive process, and itis possible that people use faster, cheaper shortcuts to makepredictions and inferences in complicated physical scenarios.Here we asked people to predict the eventual destination of aball on a 2D bumper table (in the style of Smith, de Peres, Vul,and Tenenbaum (2017)). We designed scenarios that we ex-pected would modulate the use of heuristics and simulation:the bumper table provided varying degrees of containment toconstrain future outcomes and to make a containment heuris-tic more useful, and could have more or less internal struc-ture to vary the reliability of noisy simulation. As the con-tainment heuristic becomes more useful, and as simulation be-comes more expensive, we expected that people would switchfrom using simulation to rely more on rapid heuristic-basedpredictions and therefore respond faster. Instead, we foundthat even when containment was very predictive, people wereprogressively slower and less accurate as simulation complex-ity increased, indicating that they persisted in using simulationrather than containment heuristics.