Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of the mental processes people use to perform physi-cal reasoning often differ on whether they are based on simu-lation or on logical reasoning. Here we test how these differentprocesses might combine in a motion-prediction task that canbe solved either by simulation or by reasoning about the topol-ogy of the scene. Participants were asked to predict which oftwo goals a computerized ball would reach first, but in someof these scenes the ball was ‘contained’ in the same space asone goal but was topologically separated from the other. Evenin these contained scenes, participants responded faster whenthey received motion information that would speed up simu-lation but not affect topological parsing. This suggests thatsimulation contributes to predicting short-range motion, evenwhen alternate strategies are available.