ArticleiScience2024
A dedicated mental resource for intuitive physics.
Article in iScience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2026Article
- Motor Skill Learning of a Racing Video Game With Intuitive versus Inverted and Random Controls.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
- Distinct and shared neural resources between processing of dynamic physical objects and spatial working memory.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Novel tool use does not depend on mechanical reasoning: evidence from apraxia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Dissociation between physical reasoning and tool use in individuals with left hemisphere brain damage.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Relational dynamics inform predictive motor planning and perception.Journal of neurophysiology · 2025Article
- Decoding predicted future states from the brain's "physics engine".Science advances · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Countless decisions and actions in daily life draw on a mental model of the physical structure and dynamics of the world - from stepping carefully around a patch of slippery pavement to stacking delicate produce in a shopping basket. People can make fast and accurate inferences about how physical interactions will unfold, but it remains unclear whether we do so by applying a general set of physical principles across scenarios, or instead by reasoning about the physics of individual scenarios in an ad-hoc fashion. Here, we hypothesized that humans possess a dedicated and flexible mental resource for physical inference, and we tested for such a resource using a battery of fine-tuned tasks to capture individual differences in performance. Despite varying scene contents across tasks, we found that performance was highly correlated among them and well-explained by a unitary intuitive physics resource, distinct from other facets of cognition such as spatial reasoning and working memory.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.