Notes on experiment

[erindb]

If people have the option to describe the events in lower detail vs. using causal language, what do they do?

Videos with A on the left and B on the right where physics is purely elastic.

Give people a grammar of utterances where the following sentences (dropdown menus) can be linked with "and" or "then":

• (A|B) moved (fast|slow) to the (right|left)
• A caused B to move
• B caused A to move
• A affected B
• B affected A
• A and B collided
• A hit B
• B hit A
• sped up / slowed down (?) stopped (?)

Reference-game style where distractor videos are unknown.

Questions:

• (when) do people use "cause"?
• how asymmetric is hitting vs colliding?
• can ppl reconstruct from descriptions?
• how long are utterances?

[tobiasgerstenberg]

we might also want to consider situations in which the balls are animate and have the capacity for self-propelled motion.

in this case, the following two descriptions would come apart:

• "A moved fast right THEN A didn't move AND B moved fast" --> A stops when B starts to move but A didn't cause B's movement

• "A moved fast right THEN A caused B to move" --> A caused Bs movement