In the field of artificial intelligence the study of naïve physics is a part of the effort to formalize the common knowledge of human beings.
[1] Many ideas of folk physics are simplifications, misunderstandings, or misperceptions of well-understood phenomena, incapable of giving useful predictions of detailed experiments, or simply are contradicted by more thorough observations.
The idea of absolute simultaneity survived until 1905, when the special theory of relativity and its supporting experiments discredited it.
[4][5] Researchers measure physiological responses such as heart rate and eye movement in order to quantify the reaction to a particular stimulus.
Research in naïve physics relies on technology to measure eye gaze and reaction time in particular.
As an example of the use of this method, research by Susan Hespos and colleagues studied five-month-old infants' responses to the physics of liquids and solids.
[6] Researchers infer that the longer the infant takes to habituate to a new stimulus, the more it violates his or her expectations of physical phenomena.
[7] But research shows that infants, who do not yet have such expansive knowledge of the world, have the same extended reaction to events that appear physically impossible.
Smith and Casati (1994) have reviewed the early history of naïve physics, and especially the role of the Italian psychologist Paolo Bozzi.
As mentioned above, the physically impossible event holds the infant's attention longer, indicating surprise when expectations are violated.
The children's game peek-a-boo is a classic example of this phenomenon, and one which obscures the true grasp infants have on permanence.
The experimenter then places the tall cylinder completely into a much shorter cylindrical container, and the impossible event confuses the infant.