Seeing Soft Materials Draped Over Objects: A Case Study of Intuitive Physics in Perception, Attention, and Memory
通过多个在线实验发现，人们在观察覆盖软材料的物体时，视觉系统能自动提取物体深层结构信息，而非仅关注表面褶皱，表明直觉物理学在低层视觉处理中发挥作用。
We typically think of intuitive physics in terms of high-level cognition, but might aspects of physics also be extracted during lower-level visual processing? Might we not only think about physics, but also see it? We explored this using multiple tasks in online adult samples with objects covered by soft materials—as when you see a chair with a blanket draped over it—where you must account for the physical interactions between cloth, gravity, and object. In multiple change-detection experiments ( n = 200), observers from an online testing marketplace were better at detecting image changes involving underlying object structure versus those involving only the superficial folds of cloths—even when the latter were more extreme along several dimensions. And in probe-comparison experiments ( n = 100), performance was worse when both probes (vs. only one) appeared on image regions reflective of underlying object structure (equating visual properties). This work collectively shows how vision uses intuitive physics to recover the deeper underlying structure of scenes.