There are a lot of things that people are good at guessing just by taking a look, like whether something is sturdy enough, or well-balanced. But it seems that knots are something that eludes most of us. Once a good sturdy knot is placed among similar but worse ones, our brains can’t immediately recognize the one we should go for.
The study team started by showing participants four knots of different strengths and asking them to pick the strongest between two in each quartet. The participants failed at that. They were shown videos of the knots slowly rotating, so they could get a clear understanding of them. It did not help. Showing the knots next to a diagram of their constructions also didn’t elucidate the issue. No matter how important knots are in our lives, we don’t immediately get them.
“People are terrible at this,” co-author Chaz Firestone, who researches perception at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. “Humanity has been using knots for thousands of years. They’re not that complicated – they’re just some string tangled up. Yet you can show people real pictures of knots and ask them for any judgment about how the knot will behave and they have no clue.”
Which knot is the strongest?
Image credit: Khamar Hopkins / Johns Hopkins University
The project was developed by Sholei Croom, a PhD student in Firestone’s lab and a passionate embroiderer. Croom studies intuitive physics: what people can understand of their environment just by looking at it. Knots appear to be a human shortcoming.
“We tried to give people the best chance we could in the experiment, including showing them videos of the knots rotating and it didn’t help at all – if anything people’s responses were even more all over the place,” Croom said. “The human psychological system just fails to ascertain any physical knowledge from the properties of the knot.”
In general, the participants were incorrect about the strongest knot and when they guessed right, their reasoning was wrong. It could be possible that non-rigid objects are more difficult for our brains to figure out immediately, and this is why knots might be straining our judging mechanisms.
The participants were not knot experts, so it is likely that people who have a lot of experience with knots might be able to better ascertain the correct one. That would come from acquired knowledge, not our ability to just judge the structure by itself.
“We’re just not able to extract a salient sense of a knot’s internal structure by looking at it,” Croom said. “It’s a nice case study into how many open questions still remain in our ability to reason about the environment.”
The study is published in the journal Open Mind.
Source Link: "Knot" As Strong As You Think: Humans Are Bad At Working Out Which Knots Are Strongest
