An Embodied and Holistic Framework of Intuitive Physics

Intuitive physics has been studied for decades yet the question where does our knowledge of the world come from remains controversial. Similarly a persistent dissociation between verbal judgments and action tasks exists within the empirical data. A phenomenon often explained by positing separate cognitive systems for judgment and action. This review challenges the claim that an internal model is necessary to understand the physical world arguing instead for a unified ecological-embodied framework, where the dichotomy between mind and body is erased and perception is conceptualized as a psychosomatic act. Drawing on Gibson’s theory of direct perception and synthesizing evidence from perceptual-motor calibration experiments, I propose that intuitive physics is grounded in the perception of body-scaled affordances. From this perspective, common errors like the "impetus theory" are not flawed internal models but the misapplication of robust, context-specific action heuristics to decontextualized problems. The dissociation is reinterpreted not as evidence of two knowledge systems, but as a single, adaptive perceptual system operating in information-rich versus information-poor contexts. This reconceptualization offers a more parsimonious account of how we understand the physical world.