Learning physical parameters from dynamic scenes (Exp 1)

Participants watched short movies of interacting "hockey pucks" moving in synthetic 2D microworlds and then judged object masses, surface frictions, pairwise interaction forces, and global forces. Each participant saw 5 of the 60 movies, one from each of 5 different worlds, assigned by a Latin square (2 subject groups x 6 rows) and presented in a randomized order.