From building towers to picking an orange from a stack of fruit, assessing support is critical
for successfully interacting with the physical world. But how do people determine whether …

Humans are interactive agents driven to seek out situations with interesting physical
dynamics. Here we formalize the functional form of physical intrinsic motivation. We first …

Recent work in computer vision and cognitive reasoning has given rise to an increasing
adoption of the Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) paradigm in synthetic datasets. Inspired by …

The fact that objects without proper support will fall to the ground is not only a natural
phenomenon, but also common sense in mind. Previous studies suggest that humans may …

Abstract eople are able to reason about the physical dynamics of everyday objects. One
proposal for the computations underlying this ability is that people are running an …

How do people perform general-purpose physical reasoning across a variety of scenarios in
everyday life? Across two studies with seven different physical scenarios, we asked …

Our ability to make reliable physical predictions even in novel settings is a hallmark of
human intelligence. Here we investigate how people infer multiple physical variables …

From building towers to picking an orange from a stack of fruit, assessing support is critical
for successfully interacting with the physical world. But how do people determine whether …

While language models have begun to show signs of understanding causal relationships,
vision models seem to lag behind. We introduce Counterfactual World Modeling (CWM)—a …