Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We introduce a new problem solving paradigm: solving physical puzzles by placing tool-like objects in a scene. Thepuzzles are designed to explicitly evoke different physical concepts such as support, blocking, tipping, and launching, andare typically solved in a handful of trials. We study human participants’ problem solving strategies, including what theytry first, how they update their actions based on failed attempts, and how many attempts they eventually take to solvethe puzzles. We introduce the ‘Sample, Simulate, Remember’ model that incorporates object-based priors to generatehypotheses, mental simulation to test hypotheses, and a memory and generalization system to update across simulationsand real-world trials, and show that all three components are needed to explain human performance. Further results canbe found at https://k-r-allen.github.io/tool-games/