Eye Gaze Reveals How People Flexibly Combine Abstraction and Mental Simulation
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Despite the ubiquity and importance of intuitive physical reasoning, the computations underlying this commonsense ability are in dispute. Some researchers believe that people use a general-purpose mental simulation engine, while others think that people use specialized physical heuristics or abstractions. More recent proposals have suggested people switch between (or combine) these different cognitive strategies. Here, we show that these two modes of physical reasoning are associated with different patterns of eye movements. Participants were shown brief animations of an object in motion, and asked questions about the object's future location. During periods likely to involve mental simulation, people's gaze moved in small increments, in line with step-by-step unfolding of the object's path. During periods likely to involve abstraction, people's gaze moved in larger increments, as though jumping from the beginning to the end of a linear path. These results suggest that intuitive physics can flexibly combine mental simulation and abstraction in real time.
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7205010237