| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
Fiscal Year 1991: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This study investigated the nature and origin of naive physics and naive biology and found that they are crucially linked to the perception of objects' motion.
Specifically, we conducted the following experiments and obtained the following results.
1. Adult subjects observed on a computer monitor various motion patterns of one luminous dot differing in speed, acceleration rate, and direction and asked to rate for each motion pattern "force in notion" and "control in motion". It was found that motion in horizontal direction was generally perceived as a result of some force excerted or applied and motion in vertical direction (downward) as natural notioii with no force excerted or applied. This result corresponds perfectly to a novice's preconception in physics that " Object's motion is caused by force and if the object is rest-in-stasis, no force is applied" and to the novice's undifferentiation between mass and weight, thus suggesting the close link between naive physics and motion perce
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ption.
2. Adult subjects observed on a computer monitor the locomotion patterns of an insect, a hamster, a ball, and a dry leaf which were represented by (1) a luminous dot or (2) luminous line indicating object's head and tail. They also observe (3) body-part movements of a running animal and a puppet animal represented by several luminous dots attached to their major joints. When asked to judge each motion pattern's "animacy" impression, the subjects clearly discriminate animal's motion pattern, and this holds true at any representation mode. It was also found that when, at mode (2), the swaying movement of the line was experimentally changed to its mirror-image movement while the overall locomotion trail was intact, the line's animacy impression dissipated, indicating that inter -level relations of the nested structure of animal locomotion is one of the important source of information yeilding animacy impression. The study thus showed that there is everyday understanding of animate and inanimate objects separately from school biology and that is critically based on the perception of object's motion. Less
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