Dissociating intuitive physics from intuitive psychology: Evidence from Williams syndrome
Name
nihms890382.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
641.97 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Kamps, Frederik S
Julian, Joshua B
Battaglia, Peter
Landau, Barbara
Kanwisher, Nancy
Dilks, Daniel D
Date Issued
2017
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Prior work suggests that our understanding of how things work (“intuitive physics”) and how people work (“intuitive psychology”) are distinct domains of human cognition. Here we directly test the dissociability of these two domains by investigating knowledge of intuitive physics and intuitive psychology in adults with Williams syndrome (WS) – a genetic developmental disorder characterized by severely impaired spatial cognition, but relatively spared social cognition. WS adults and mental-age matched (MA) controls completed an intuitive physics task and an intuitive psychology task. If intuitive physics is a distinct domain (from intuitive psychology), then we should observe differential impairment on the physics task for individuals with WS compared to MA controls. Indeed, adults with WS performed significantly worse on the intuitive physics than the intuitive psychology task, relative to controls. These results support the hypothesis that knowledge of the physical world can be disrupted independently from knowledge of the social world.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.COGNITION.2017.06.027
