Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Decisions under risk have been classically studied with tasks involving lotteries with explicit monetary rewards and uncertain gambles. More recently, sensorimotor decisions, specifically single movements to targets yielding rewards and losses, have been conceptualized as decisions under risk. While human choices between gambles have long been known not to maximize expected gains, sensorimotor decisions have been well described by statistical decision theory in many tasks. However, because many naturalistic scenarios of sensorimotor decisions are inescapably governed by the laws of physics, the question arises, how people act under such circumstances. Here, participants slid pucks to target areas, providing gains and losses in a virtual environment so that the uncertainty inherent in motor control interacts with the physical relationships governing objects' motion. Using model comparison with several generative models of participants' sliding actions, we find evidence that human motor decisions in scenarios with prospective economic outcomes take Newtonian physics into account.