Abstract
People can handle everyday interactions with everyday objects with remarkable ease. One current model of human 'intuitive physics' supposes that people are carrying out a mental simulation, moving objects in the mind step by step. While successful in many cases, even the people who back it recognize that humans can't be running a perfect simulation. In this talk, I will consider some bounds and approximations that might go into an imperfect mental simulation, computational models that capture them, and behavioral studies that probe them.