The Union College Psychology Department Speaker Series and Honors Colloquium welcome
Tomer Ullman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
for a public lecture entitled
Good Enough: Approximations in Mental Simulation and Intuitive Physics
Thursday, May 1, 2025
12:45–1:50 PM • Karp 105
Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
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 they 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 the people who champion this idea recognize that humans can't be running a perfect simulation. In this talk, I consider 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. I will also consider the computational models that capture these approximations, and behavioral studies that inform the arguments empirically.