Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we present a new task that investigates how peo-ple interact with and make judgments about towers of blocks.In Experiment 1, participants in the lab solved a series of prob-lems in which they had to re-configure three blocks from aninitial to a final configuration. We recorded whether they usedone hand or two hands to do so. In Experiment 2, we askedparticipants online to judge whether they think the person inthe lab used one or two hands. The results revealed a closecorrespondence between participants’ actions in the lab, andthe mental simulations of participants online. To explain par-ticipants’ actions and mental simulations, we develop a modelthat plans over a symbolic representation of the situation, exe-cutes the plan using a geometric solver, and checks the plan’sfeasibility by taking into account the physical constraints of thescene. Our model explains participants’ actions and judgmentsto a high degree of quantitative accuracy.