Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A growing body of evidence supports the hypothesis that hu-mans infer future states of perceived physical situations bypropagating noisy representations forward in time using ratio-nal (approximate) physics. In the present study, we examinewhether humans are able to predict (1) the resting geometryof sand pouring from a funnel and (2) the dynamics of threesubstances—liquid, sand, and rigid balls—flowing past obsta-cles into two basins. Participants’ judgments in each experi-ment are consistent with simulation results from the intuitivesubstance engine (ISE) model, which employs a Material PointMethod (MPM) simulator with noisy inputs. The ISE outper-forms ground-truth physical models in each situation, as wellas two data-driven models. The results reported herein expandon previous work proposing human use of mental simulation inphysical reasoning and demonstrate human proficiency in pre-dicting the dynamics of sand, a substance that is less commonin daily life than liquid or rigid objects.