Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our ability to plan and build a wide array of physicalstructures, from sand castles to skyscrapers, is a definingfeature of modern human intelligence. What cognitive toolsenable us to create such complex and varied structures?Here we investigate how practice “reverse-engineering” a setof physical structures impacts the procedures that peoplesubsequently use to build those structures, as well as how wellthey build them over time. Participants (N=105) viewed 2Dsilhouettes of 8 unique block towers in a virtual environmentsimulating rigid-body physics, and aimed to reconstruct eachone in less than 60 seconds. We found that people learnto build each tower more accurately and quickly acrossrepeated attempts, and that these gains reflect both group-levelconvergence upon a smaller set of viable policies, as wellas error-dependent updating of each individual’s strategies.Taken together, our study provides novel insight into howhumans learn from prior experience to discover better solutionsto physical reasoning problems over time.