Core cognition in adult vision: A surprising discrepancy between the principles of object continuity and solidity.

From an early age, humans intuitively expect physical objects to obey core principles, including continuity (objects follow spatiotemporally continuous paths) and solidity (two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time). These two principles are sometimes viewed as deriving from a single overarching “persistence” principle. Indeed, violations of solidity where one solid object seemingly passes through another could theoretically be interpreted as a violation of continuity, with an object “teleporting” to switch places rather than passing through a solid obstacle. However, it is an empirical issue whether the two principles are processed distinctly or identically to one another. Here, adult participants tracked objects during dynamic events in a novel location detection task, which sometimes involved violations of the principles of continuity or solidity. While participants explicitly noticed both types of violations and reported being equally surprised at both, they made more errors and answered more slowly after continuity violations than after solidity violations. Our results demonstrate that the two principles show different signature patterns, and are thus represented distinctly in the mind.