Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work shows that people often believe, contrary toactual physics, that objects travelling in a curved path througha tube will continue to travel in a curved path after exiting thetube. In the present study, previous work was replicated, butaccuracy increased in a new condition in which people wereasked to catch an actual ball emerging from a tube. That is, inthis case there is a discrepancy between how we believe theworld works, and how our motor system responds to events inthe world. This finding supports the theory that the perceptionand action systems of the brain use different methods topredict how things move in the world, and that the abstractreasoning systems used to explain how the world works areoften in conflict with the action systems.