Visual Perception of Intuitive Physics and Its Computational Foundations

The visual system is attuned to the statistical regularities of the visual world, enabling rapid, almost reflexive, and highly accurate recognition of object identities and categories. This article presents recent advances across psychophysics, computational modeling, and cognitive neuroscience, which together suggest that the visual system is just as attuned to the laws of physics governing our physical world. We review psychophysical work showing that vision incorporates intuitive physics as a rapid, spontaneous, and stimulus-driven process. We review the computational framework of physics-based analysis by synthesis, which suggests that the visual perception of intuitive physics corresponds to building and manipulating approximate structure-preserving representations of physical scenes. We end with an outline of an integrative program of computational modeling work, along with neuroscientific and psychophysical studies, toward psychologically and neurally refined mechanistic accounts of the visual perception of intuitive physics.