When you hear the words “scientific experiment,” you probably think of images of various colorful chemicals bubbling in vials or laser beams colliding. You may be dreaming of a slightly more modest image. However, it probably doesn’t make you think of a bunch of people sitting in a room watching a video of someone shaking a box.
Scientists recently conducted such an experiment, and behind the almost incredibly modest exterior, the experiment offered a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the human brain.
This experiment was meant to test something you’re probably very skilled at, even if you’ve never thought about it before. “Just by looking at how a person’s body moves, you can tell what they’re trying to learn about their environment,” study author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. “We do this all the time, but there’s been very little research on it.” ”
What Firestone is talking about here is a form of behavior called epistemic action. This behavior describes the actions we take when trying to learn some information about an object or our environment. What the box shaking experiment shows is that people are very good at understanding the logic behind another person’s behavior. The team recruited 500 people for this study and asked them to watch two videos of someone shaking a box.
These two videos asked if they could guess which shaker was trying to find the number of items in the box and which shaker was trying to find the shape of the object in the box. Almost all of the 500 participants were able to guess correctly, and they arrived at the result in just a few seconds.
“What was surprising to me was how intuitive this was,” said Sholei Croom, lead author of the study. “People can actually understand what others are trying to understand, which shows how we can make these judgments even though what we’re looking at is very noisy and varies from person to person.” ”
The next thing the team wanted to investigate was how good we were at distinguishing between epistemic actions and other, sometimes similar, classes of behavior called pragmatic actions.
For example, checking the temperature of the water with your foot before entering the bathroom would be an epistemic action. However, if you’re just stepping into the bathroom, you’ll probably put your feet in the water first and make sure you know the water is just right. This would also be a pragmatic action.
As the study authors note, being able to perceive why a person is performing an action, even if it’s the same action, is an impressive human ability, and this work could have major real-world implications. An example of this is in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) developing robots that can infer what we are looking for from our actions, just as we humans do all the time without realizing it.
The study was published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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