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Poster A35 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Opinion: Naive psychology depends on naive physics
Shari Liu1 (), Joseph Outa1, Seda Karakose-Akbiyik2; 1Johns Hopkins University, 2Harvard University
People are immaterial minds, housed in material bodies. How do we consider psychological and physical information to make sense of them? Research across the cognitive sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and clinical psychology, has accumulated evidence that naive psychology and naive physics are modular, non-interacting systems. We disagree. To the contrary, we use evidence from each of these disciplines, and research from computational cognitive science, to argue that naive psychology and physics constitute parallel and integrated systems in human minds and brains. We end by previewing a research program to investigate this integration.
Keywords: cognitive development domain-specificity physical reasoning social cognition