'Not so intuitive' physics: Orientation supersedes stability in prioritizing attention

In our daily life, we encounter a wide array of objects. However, we have a limited understanding of how the stability of these objects influences how we allocate our attention. To address this, we have investigated how perceived stability interacts with our attentional system using a modified version of the cueless temporal order judgement task. Here, participants were presented with stable and unstable objects, separated by small temporal intervals, and asked to report which object appeared first in the display. Each of our experiments employed a different pair of stable (i.e., presented upright in its original state) and unstable (i.e., presented in an inverted and angled orientation to render the object unstable) stimuli. Participants' responses were fit into logistic regression models, and their point of subjective simultaneity was calculated using the fitted model. Experiment 1 used a common object, a traffic cone, and the stable traffic cone captured attention. To control for familiarity, Experiment 2 used a never-before-seen object, and there was no significant difference between the stable and unstable versions. Experiment 3 compared a vertical line against a tilted line to control for low-level features, and the vertical line captured attention. These findings suggest that stability per se does not capture attention. Rather, features that commonly signal stability, such as upright orientation and familiarity, may drive early attentional prioritization. We propose that the perception of stability is inferred from these underlying cues, rather than functioning as a guiding feature on its own.