Newtonian Predictions Are Integrated With Sensory Information in 3D Motion Perception
研究通过三维台球碰撞实验，发现人类视觉系统在感知运动时，会内化牛顿力学规律，将感官信息与物理预测整合，且当两者不一致时，知觉偏向牛顿预测。
Because the motions of everyday objects obey Newtonian mechanics, perhaps these laws or approximations thereof are internalized by the brain to facilitate motion perception. Shepard’s seminal investigations of this hypothesis demonstrated that the visual system fills in missing information in a manner consistent with kinematic constraints. Here, we show that perception relies on internalized regularities not only when filling in missing information but also when available motion information is inconsistent with the expected outcome of a physical event. When healthy adult participants ( Ns = 11, 11, 12, respectively, in Experiments 1, 2, and 3) viewed 3D billiard-ball collisions demonstrating varying degrees of consistency with Newtonian mechanics, their perceptual judgments of postcollision trajectories were biased toward the Newtonian outcome. These results were consistent with a maximum-likelihood model of sensory integration in which perceived target motion following a collision is a reliability-weighted average of a sensory estimate and an internal prediction consistent with Newtonian mechanics.