Abstract
Here we show how an implicit model of the physical force of friction is embedded in the operation of visual attention and memory. Most objects that we see are in frictive contact with a ‘floor’, such that clockwise rotation causes rightward movement, and counterclockwise rotation causes leftward movement. In Experiment 1 we reasoned that, due to this regularity, seeing an isolated, rotating ‘wheel’ might orient spatial attention in the direction the wheel would normally move if touching a floor. Indeed, we found that clockwise rotation produced faster responses to subsequent targets appearing on the right vs. left (and vice versa for counterclockwise rotation). In Experiment 2, we asked whether this ‘rotation cueing’ effect might also be sensitive to visible contact with another surface. We found that the rotating wheel produced a stronger cueing effect when seen touching (vs. not touching) a visible floor, and the *opposite* cueing pattern when seen touching a ‘ceiling’. Thus rotating objects orient spatial attention in a way which by default assumes frictive floor contact, but which is also highly sensitive to visual cues to surface contact in the scene. In Experiments 3 and 4, we asked whether memory for rotating objects’ locations similarly models their frictive interactions with other surfaces. Observers tend to misremember a moving object’s last-seen position as displaced in its direction of movement (a memory bias called ‘Representational Momentum’, or RM). We found that a lone, rightward-moving wheel produced more RM when it rotated clockwise (and vice versa for a leftward-moving wheel). Moreover, this effect was also sensitive to additional visual cues to surface contact, weakening for wheels shown near but not touching another surface, and again reversing for wheels seen touching a ceiling. To predict and remember objects’ positions, we implicitly model the propulsive consequences of the force of friction.