CogSci 2025

•

August 02, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

statistical learning

eye tracking

artificial intelligence

vision

neural networks

Humans reliably infer complex physical relationships between objects in everyday scenes, yet the mechanisms underlying these judgments remain unclear. We explored whether convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can approximate intuitive physical reasoning by capturing statistical regularities in visual experience. We trained a CNN (Inception-v4) to predict tower stability and tested how well its outputs aligned with human judgments (N = 500). CNN predictions more closely matched human judgments (r = 0.718, p < 0.001, accuracy = 81%) than ground-truth predictions from physics simulations (r = 0.406, p = 0.002, accuracy = 68%), suggesting that both CNNs and humans rely on visual heuristics. Eye-tracking data revealed that CNN importance maps overlapped significantly with human gaze patterns, indicating shared attention to features statistically predictive of physical outcomes in intuitive physical judgments. Our findings show that CNNs trained on visual data capture perceptual cues used in human intuitive physics, highlighting their value as models of heuristic reasoning.

Downloads

Paper

Next from CogSci 2025

Semantic-Pragmatic Adaptation to Variable Use of Temporal Expressions
poster

Semantic-Pragmatic Adaptation to Variable Use of Temporal Expressions

CogSci 2025

Yuxin Cao and 1 other author

02 August 2025

Similar lecture

VGG-19 Displays Human-like Biases in Statistical Judgment from Visual Graphs
poster

VGG-19 Displays Human-like Biases in Statistical Judgment from Visual Graphs

CogSci 2025

+1
Ruiyi Ding and 3 other authors

02 August 2025