Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often hold the intuition that heavier objects fall faster, yet can still accurately catch objects of different masses. Such coexistence of naïve physics and the internal model of Earth's gravity is well documented, but how these are weighted when they conflict remains unclear. We designed a Virtual Reality ball-catching experiment to examine how acceleration manipulations and the presence of a second, visible ball that enabled visual comparison modulate motor catching and perceptual judgment. We found that, when participants attempted to catch a single occluded ball, both motor catching and naturalness judgments showed a partial reliance on the internal model and were especially successful in distinguishing slow accelerations. Introducing a second ball with manipulated acceleration shifted judgments towards naïve physics expectations, while motor catching accuracy remained relatively robust. Our findings highlight how naïve physics can manifest at the perceptual level and inform motor-level embodied learning designs to initiate conceptual changes.