New McDermott lab study: how humans judge ball mass from impact sounds alone
JoshHMcDermott · x · 2026-11-10
Josh McDermott (MIT) introduces a research thread on an ill-posed inference task: you hear two balls dropped on two different surfaces — which is heavier? Each sound is caused by two unknown objects. Subsequent posts describe how his lab measured impulse responses from hundreds of objects, fit probabilistic generative models, and ran 'lesion' experiments showing humans exploit knowledge of real-world object acoustic statistics to constrain physical inference from sound.
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