Refreshments are available starting at 12:45 p.m. The seminar will begin at 1 p.m.
Abstract
From spreading mayo on toast to dodging an errant frisbee, people handle the everyday physical world with remarkable ease. Without a sense of “intuitive physics,” every day would be a series of small disasters. How do people do it? One current model of intuitive physics supposes that people are carrying out a kind of mental simulation, moving objects in the mind step by step. While successful in several cases, even people who champion this idea recognize that humans can’t be running a perfect simulation. In this talk, Tomer Ullman considers several principled bounds and approximations that may underlie imperfect mental simulation in humans. These include approximate bodies in tracking, lazy evaluation in imagery, and bounds on the number of objects that can be simulated at once. He will also consider the computational models that capture these approximations, and behavioral studies that inform the arguments empirically.
Speaker Biography
Tomer Ullman is the Morris Kahn Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and an affiliate of the Kempner Institute at Harvard University, where he heads the Cognition, Computation, and Development Lab. He got his PhD in computational cognitive modeling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015, after which he was a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. Ullman’s research focuses on commonsense reasoning and intuitive theories of the world, and he uses a variety of tools and methods from across cognitive science, cognitive development, and computational modeling. In particular, he is interested in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology. This covers the everyday understanding of things and people, but also commonsense reasoning in uncommon situations, including magic, the imagination, loopholes, scripts, impossibilities, and creativity.