Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we describe three experiments involving simplephysical judgments and predictions, and argue their results aregenerally inconsistent with three core commitments of proba-bilistic mental simulation theory (PMST). The first experimentshows that people routinely fail to track the spatio-temporalidentity of objects. The second experiment shows that peopleoften incorrectly reverse the order of consequential physicalevents when making physical predictions. Finally, we demon-strate a physical version of the conjunction fallacy where par-ticipants rate the probability of two joint events as more likelyto occur than a constituent event of that set. These results high-light the limitations or boundary conditions of simulation the-ory.