Related papers: Human causal perception in a cube-stacking task
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
We present a theoretical study of classical Wigner crystals in two- and three-dimensional isotropic parabolic traps aiming at understanding and quantifying the configurational uncertainty due to the presence of multiple stable…
Confidence estimates are often "detection-like" - driven by positive evidence in favour of a decision. This empirical observation has been interpreted as showing that human metacognition is limited by biases or heuristics. Here, we show…
Falls affect a growing number of the population each year. Clinical methods to identify those at greatest risk for falls usually evaluate individuals while they perform specific motions such as balancing or Sit-to-Stand (STS). Unfortunately…
Safety in human-robot interaction can be divided into physical safety and perceived safety, where the latter is still under-addressed in the literature. Investigating perceived safety in human-robot interaction requires a multidisciplinary…
This paper demonstrates that some non-classical models of human decision-making can be run successfully as circuits on quantum computers. Since the 1960s, many observed cognitive behaviors have been shown to violate rules based on classical…
Visually predicting the stability of block towers is a popular task in the domain of intuitive physics. While previous work focusses on prediction accuracy, a one-dimensional performance measure, we provide a broader analysis of the learned…
Decision making is challenging when there is more than one criterion to consider. In such cases, it is common to assign a goodness score to each item as a weighted sum of its attribute values and rank them accordingly. Clearly, the ranking…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
Understanding causes and effects in mechanical systems is an essential component of reasoning in the physical world. This work poses a new problem of counterfactual learning of object mechanics from visual input. We develop the CoPhy…
Covariational reasoning -- how one thinks about the way changes in one quantity affect another quantity -- is essential to calculus and physics instruction alike. As physics is often centered on understanding and predicting changes in…
I study robust comparative statics for risk-averse subjective expected utility (SEU) maximizers. Starting with a finite menu of actions totally ordered by sensitivity to risk, I identify the transformations of her menu that lead a…
Humans effortlessly navigate the physical world by predicting how objects behave under gravity and contact forces, yet how such judgments support sequential physical planning under resource constraints remains poorly understood. Research on…
The ability to flexibly transform between different representations (e.g., from mathematical to graphical representations) of the same concept is a hallmark of expertise. Prior research suggests that many introductory physics students show…
Suppose each of $n$ men and $n$ women is located at a point in a metric space. A woman ranks the men in order of their distance to her from closest to farthest, breaking ties at random. The men rank the women similarly. An interesting…
A simple framework for reasoning under uncertainty and intervention is introduced. This is achieved in three steps. First, logic is restated in set-theoretic terms to obtain a framework for reasoning under certainty. Second, this framework…
In this paper, an experimental testbed and associated psychophysical paradigm are presented for understanding how people discriminate torsional stiffness using wrist rotation about their forearm. Featured in the testbed are two 1-DoF rotary…
Humans live and act in 3D space, but often work and communicate on 2D surfaces. The prevalence of online communication on 2D screens raises the issue of whether human spatial configuration affects our capabilities, social perception, and…
We provide elementary proofs of several results concerning the possible outcomes arising from a fixed profile within the class of positional voting systems. Our arguments enable a simple and explicit construction of paradoxical profiles,…