When you’re in a huge rush, your brain stops doing the math on how things move and just starts taking 'good enough' visual guesses to save time.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
Overhang Tower: Resource-Rational Adaptation in Sequential Physical Planning
arXiv · 2604.09072
The Takeaway
It is not just that we get sloppier under pressure; our brains actually change the fundamental logic they use to interact with the world. We transition from 'running a mental movie' of what will happen to relying on gut-feeling visual cues to make split-second decisions.
From the abstract
Humans effortlessly navigate the physical world by predicting how objects behave under gravity and contact forces, yet how such judgments support sequential physical planning under resource constraints remains poorly understood. Research on intuitive physics debates whether prediction relies on the Intuitive Physics Engine (IPE) or fast, cue-based heuristics; separately, decision-making research debates deliberative lookahead versus myopic strategies. These debates have proceeded in isolation, l