Humans solve ill-posed physics-from-sound via joint inference of object variables, MIT paper shows
JoshHMcDermott · x · 2026-11-10
The core takeaway post from the MIT McDermott lab's impact-sound thread (with the paper's main figure): perceiving physical variables from sound is an ill-posed scene analysis problem, solved by humans through internalized knowledge of how objects make sound — the brain jointly infers mass, material, size, shape, and damping (P(object₁, object₂ | sound)). Experiments include judging whether an object's damping increased by being held. Data and code are open-sourced.
More from Research
- AI Trials Observatory launches: 93 RCTs on how AI affects mental health and beliefs — DG_Rand · 2026-11-11
- Raschka: open LLMs have abandoned full attention — hybrids and linear models now split 50/50 — rasbt · 2026-11-11
- Strogatz & Townsend's new book Big Math tackles math's Faustian bargain with AI — stevenstrogatz · 2026-11-11
- RLVR lets small models close the coding gap; Python's dynamic typing hurts pretraining — mdancho84 · 2026-11-11
- 50 researchers from ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent release 303-page code AI field guide — mdancho84 · 2026-11-11
- pi-H3 generates 768p video in 2-4 steps: 10s clip in 9.2s on a single B200 — GordonWetzstein · 2026-11-11