McDermott lab: humans use real-world acoustic priors to constrain physical inference
JoshHMcDermott · x · 2026-11-10
Part 12 of Josh McDermott's (MIT) research thread: a complementary experiment asked listeners to judge from sound alone whether a struck object was damped by being held in someone's hands. As in the mass-discrimination experiments, performance was most impaired for conditions with the lowest likelihood under the intact generative model, consistent with humans using knowledge of real-world object statistics to constrain physical inferences.
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