Applicability and boundary of mental simulation across varying simulation costs

Determine whether human intuitive physics employs mental simulation across scenarios with varying simulation costs and ascertain the boundary conditions that delimit the applicability of mental simulation in such judgments.

Background

Intuitive physics research often posits that humans use mental simulation to reason about physical events. However, the extent to which this strategy is used uniformly across tasks of differing complexity and cost has been debated. The paper frames this as an unresolved issue at the outset, motivating a systematic study using a pouring-marble task spanning a range of simulation demands.

The authors investigate whether mental simulation is consistently employed and, if not, where a boundary exists that might trigger a shift to alternative strategies such as heuristics. Their dual-process model aims to capture such a switch, but the abstract explicitly identifies the overarching question about the use and limits of mental simulation as unclear at the time of writing.