Project investigating human physical construction behavior.
Our block construction environment allows people to build 2D block towers under simulated physics (Matter.js). In this version, blocks snap to valid grid locations just above available horizontal surface.
We ran an experiment to see how people's construction procedures change over repeated attempts. Over an experimental session, participants saw the silhouettes of 8 block towers (below), either 2 or 4 times. They attempted to recreate the silhouette using the blocks provided, and were rewarded for accuracy and speed.
Silhouettes shown to all participants
Our latest analyses can be found in /analysis/cogsci2020.
Task performance is analyzed in block_silhouette_cogsci2020_analysis.ipynb.
We devide analysis of building procedures between two additional notebooks:
In block_silhouette_action_sequences.ipynb we analyze sequences of block-placements, and how these change throughout the experiment.
Measuring similarity of two sequences of actions taken in first and final build attempts
In block_silhouette_state_trajectory_analysis.ipynb we look at the evolving state of the building environment during a reconstruction. We construct graphs containing multiple people's building trajectories, to quantify how similarly people build to each other at the start and end of the experiment.
Example state trajectory graphs for one structure
Helper functions can be found in /analysis/utils/.
/analysis/contains analysis scripts, broken down by submission. See/cogsci2020/for most up-to-date./analysis/utils/contains helper functions for e.g. scoring, random agents
/experiments/silhouette/contains source code for experiment/experiments/silhouette/static/js/jsPsych/jspsych-block-silhouette-buildis a custom jsPsych plugin created for this experiment. It depends on other files injs/custom/, as well asapp.js
/analysis/results/csv/contains preprocessed and anonymized CSVs for all 105 participants