What features of a physical scene make it interesting? In this project we explore both open-ended building behavior in kids, as well as adult ratings of pre-built towers. We find that interestingness is a surprisingly reliable measure between subjects, and that physical configurations that violate expectations are considered more interesting.
Where can I find things?
The repo is divided into three main sections:
/stimuli/where you can find scripts for generating or viewing the stimuli from the two experiments/experiments/where you can find code used for running the two web-based rating tasks/analysis/where you can find our scripts for analysis and results.
There are also two additional directories: models and utils which provide auxiliary support.
In this experiment we gave 53 children a set of 9 primitve plastic blocks and asked them to construct a "cool tower". We documented the towers and then asked adults to rate the towers on a scale from 1-5 on how interesting they were. Our key finding was that taller towers were considered more interesting.
stimuli We gave each of the kids a set of 9 preimitive plastic blocks and instructions to "build a cool tower". link to all towers
analysis The script generating the dataframe consisting of adult ratings of the child-built towers can be found here.
And you can find the script for generating the key figure here
In this experiment we procedurally generated towers using the TDW physics environment. We specififcally varied the height (2,4,8 blocks) and the jitter in the x position (low, med, high jitter). We created 72 towers, rendered from two different viewpoints for a total of 144 towers.
stimuli In the second experiment, we procedurally generated towers using the tdw_physics virtual 3d physics environment
analysis
- The script for the model comparisons in the paper
- Generate key figures
- We also include aditional supplemental analyses for the split-halves reliability and correlation we conducted while exploring the relationship between interestingness and stability