Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Containers are ubiquitous in daily life. By container, we consider any physical object that can contain other objects, such as bowls, bottles, baskets, trash cans, refrigerators, etc. In this paper, we are interested in following questions: What is a container? Will an object contain another object? How many objects will a container hold? We study those problems by evaluating human cognition of containers and containing relations with physical simulation. In the experiments, we analyze human judgments with respect to results of physical simulation under different scenarios. We conclude that the physical simulation is a good approximation to the human cognition of container and containing relations.