ISSN : 1226-9654
Comprehension of physical events in terms of cause and effect is fundamental for making sense of and dealing successfully with changes in the dynamic physical world. Previous research has demonstrated that the causal structure of the world can, in some cases, be directly perceived: When two billiard balls collide, observers perceive that the action of one ball caused the other's motion, merging two motion events into a unitary percept. The current study explored whether such casual interpretations can contribute to resolving low-level ambiguities in motion perception. We used a bistable apparent motion display, a motion quartet, which can lead to the perception of either horizontal or vertical motion, and tested the effects of “context objects” which moved in such a way that motion targets appeared to collide with them in either horizontal or vertical dimension. Our results show that contextual motion implying a Michotte-style launch can strongly bias observed motion correspondence, consistent with physical regularities of mechanical causality in a postdictive way. It suggests that the perception of causality is an earlier and more pervasive phenomenon than previously understood, and in fact can influence the perception of motion itself.
Anstis, S., & Ramachandran, V. S. (1987). Visual inertia in apparent motion. Vision Research, 27, 755-764.
Bechlivanidis, C., & Lagnado, D. A. (2016). Time reordered: Causal perception guides the interpretation of temporal order. Cognition, 146, 58-66.
Boyle, D. (1960). A contribution to the study of phenomenal causation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 171–179.
Brainard, D. H. (1997). Psychophysics software for use with MATLAB. Spatial Vision, 10, 433-436.
Buehner, M., & Humphreys, G. (2010). Causal contraction: Spatial binding in the perception of collision events. Psychological Science, 21, 44-48.
Chaudhuri, A., & Glaser, D. A. (1991). Metastable motion anisotropy. Visual neuroscience, 7, 397-407.
Choi, H., & Scholl, B. J. (2004). Effects of grouping and attention on the perception of causality. Perception & Psychophysics, 66, 926–942.
Choi, H., & Scholl, B. J. (2006). Perceiving causality after the fact: Postdiction in the temporal dynamics of causal perception. Perception, 35, 385.
Gordon, I., Day, R., & Stecher, E. (1990). Perceived causality occurs with stroboscopic movement of one or both stimulus elements. Perception, 19, 17–20.
Hock, H. S., Kelso, J. S., & Schöner, G. (1993). Bistability and hysteresis in the organization of apparent motion patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 19, 63-80.
Kim, S. H., Feldman, J., & Singh, M. (2013). Perceived causality can alter the perceived trajectory of apparent motion. Psychological science, 24, 575-582.
Michotte, A. (1963). The perception of causality (T. R. Miles & E. Miles, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1946).
Natsoulas, T. (1961). Principles of momentum and kinetic energy in the perception of causality. American Journal of Psychology, 74, 394–402.
Pantle, A. J., Gallogly, D. P., & Piehler, O. C. (2000). Direction biasing by brief apparent motion stimuli. Vision Research, 40, 1979–1991.
Pelli, D. G. (1997). The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: Transforming numbers into movies. Spatial Vision, 10, 437–442.
Pinkus, A., & Pantle, A. (1997). Probing visual motion signals with a priming paradigm. Vision Research, 37, 541–552.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Anstis, S. M. (1983). Perceptual organization in moving patterns. Nature. 304, 529–531.
Rolfs, M., Dambacher, M., & Cavanagh, P. (2013). Visual adaptation of the perception of causality. Current Biology, 23, 250-254.
Schlottmann, A., & Anderson, N. H. (1993). An information integration approach to phenomenal causality. Memory & Cognition, 21, 201–785.
Schlottmann, A., & Shanks, D. (1992). Evidence for a distance between judged and perceived causality. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 44A, 321–342.
Scholl, B. J., & Gao, T. (2013). Perceiving animacy and intentionality: Visual processing or higher-level judgment? In M. D. Rutherford & V. A. Kuhlmeier (Eds.), Social perception: Detection and interpretation of animacy, agency, and intention (pp. 197-230). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Scholl, B. J., & Nakayama, K. (2002). Causal capture: Contextual effects on the perception of collision events. Psychological Science, 13, 493–498.
Scholl, B. J., & Nakayama, K. (2004). Illusory causal crescents: Misperceived spatial relations due to perceived causality. Perception, 33, 455-470.
Scholl, B. J., & Tremoulet, P. D. (2000). Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 299–309.
Shimojo, S., & Nakayama, K. (1990). Amodal presence of partially occluded surfaces: role of invisible stimuli in apparent motion correspondence. Perception, 19, 285-299.
Ullman, S. (1979). The interpretation of visual motion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wertheimer, M. (1961). Experimental studies on the seeing of motion. In T. Shipley (Ed.), Classics in psychology (pp. 1032-1088). New York: Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1912)
Wichmann, F. A., & Hill, N. J. (2001a). The psychometric function: I. Fitting, sampling, and goodness of fit. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 63, 1293-1313.
Wichmann, F. A., & Hill, N. J. (2001b). The psychometric function: II. Bootstrap-based confidence intervals and sampling. Perception & Psychophysics, 63, 1314–1329.
Zacks, J. M., & Tversky, B. (2001). Event structure in perception and conception. Psychological bulletin, 127, 3-21.