Speaker:

Tomer Ullman, Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

Title:

Good Enough: Approximations in Mental Simulation and Intuitive Physics

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 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.

Speaker Bio:

Tomer Ullman is The Morris Kahn Associate Professor in the department of Psychology at Harvard University, where he heads the Cognition, Computation, and Development Lab. He got his PhD in computational cognitive modeling at MIT in 2015, after which he was a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. His 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.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98274795986
Passcode: NICO25

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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