Perceiving Causality after the Fact: Postdiction in the Temporal Dynamics of Causal Perception

In simple dynamic events we can easily perceive not only motion, but also higher-level properties such as causality, as when we see one object collide with another. Several researchers have suggested that such causal perception is an automatic and stimulus-driven process, sensitive only to particular sorts of visual information, and a major research project has been to uncover the nature of these visual cues. Here, rather than investigating what information affects causal perception, we instead explore the temporal dynamics of when certain types of information are used. Surprisingly, we find that certain visual events can determine whether we perceive a collision in an ambiguous situation even when those events occur after the moment of potential ‘impact’ in the putative collision has already passed. This illustrates a type of postdictive perception: our conscious perception of the world is not an instantaneous moment-by-moment construction, but rather is formed by integrating information presented within short temporal windows, so that new information which is obtained can influence the immediate past in our conscious awareness. Such effects have been previously demonstrated for low-level motion phenomena, but the present results demonstrate that postdictive processes can influence higher-level event perception. These findings help to characterize not only the ‘rules’ of causal perception, but also the temporal dynamics of how and when those rules operate.

[1]  K. Nakayama,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article CAUSAL CAPTURE: Contextual Effects on the Perception of Collision Events , 2022 .

[2]  W. Richards,et al.  Perception as Bayesian Inference , 2008 .

[3]  B. Scholl,et al.  The relationship between object files and conscious perception , 2005, Cognition.

[4]  P. White.  Visual Impressions of Interactions between Objects When the Causal Object Does Not Move , 2005, Perception.

[5]  P. White.  Visual causal impressions in the perception of several moving objects , 2005 .

[6]  B. Scholl,et al.  Seeing the Disappearance of Unseen Objects , 2004, Perception.

[7]  B. Scholl,et al.  Effects of grouping and attention on the perception of causality , 2004, Perception & psychophysics.

[8]  K. Nakayama,et al.  Illusory Causal Crescents: Misperceived Spatial Relations Due to Perceived Causality , 2004, Perception.

[9]  T. Sejnowski,et al.  The Line-Motion Illusion Can Be Reversed by Motion Signals after the Line Disappears , 2003, Perception.

[10]  N. Troje,et al.  Audiovisual phenomenal causality , 2003, Perception & psychophysics.

[11]  T. Hubbard,et al.  A possible role of naïve impetus in Michotte's "launching effect": Evidence from representational momentum , 2002 .

[12]  S. Shimojo,et al.  When Sound Affects Vision: Effects of Auditory Grouping on Visual Motion Perception , 2001, Psychological science.

[13]  Patrice D. Tremoulet,et al.  Perceptual causality and animacy , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[14]  T J Sejnowski,et al.  Motion integration and postdiction in visual awareness. , 2000, Science.

[15]  Refractor.  Vision , 2000, The Lancet.

[16]  Alan B. Milne,et al.  Impressions of enforced disintegration and bursting in the visual perception of collision events , 1999 .

[17]  R. Sekuler,et al.  Sound alters visual motion perception , 1997, Nature.

[18]  A. Premack,et al.  Causal cognition : a multidisciplinary debate , 1996 .

[19]  P. White.  The Understanding of Causation and the Production of Action , 1995 .

[20]  M. Morris,et al.  Culture and Cause: American and Chinese Attributions for Social and Physical Events , 1994 .

[21]  G. Butterworth,et al.  Michotte's experimental phenomenology of perception , 1994 .

[22]  N. Anderson,et al.  An information integration approach to phenomenal causality , 1993, Memory & cognition.

[23]  O. Hikosaka,et al.  Focal visual attention produces illusory temporal order and motion sensation , 1993, Vision Research.

[24]  O. Hikosaka,et al.  Voluntary and Stimulus-Induced Attention Detected as Motion Sensation , 1993, Perception.

[25]  B I Bertenthal,et al.  Directional Bias in the Perception of Translating Patterns , 1993, Perception.

[26]  D. Dennett,et al.  The Nature of Consciousness , 2006 .

[27]  D. Shanks,et al.  Evidence for a Distinction between Judged and Perceived Causality , 1992, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[28]  R. Day,et al.  Perceived Causality Occurs with Stroboscopic Movement of One or Both Stimulus Elements , 1990, Perception.

[29]  P. White.  Causal Processing: Origins and Development , 1988 .

[30]  A. Leslie,et al.  Do six-month-old infants perceive causality? , 1987, Cognition.

[31]  V. Ramachandran,et al.  The perception of apparent motion. , 1986, Scientific American.

[32]  S. Weir.  The Perception of Motion: Michotte Revisited , 1978 .

[33]  P. A. Kolers,et al.  Shape and color in apparent motion , 1976, Vision Research.

[34]  I. Adrados.  Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique , 1967 .

[35]  T. Natsoulas.  Principles of momentum and kinetic energy in the perception of causality. , 1961, The American journal of psychology.

[36]  G G Haydu,et al.  Perception of Apparent Motion. , 1960, Science.

[37]  D. Boyle.  A Contribution to the Study of Phenomenal Causation* , 1960 .

[38]  M. Yela.  Phenomenal Causation at a Distance , 1952 .

[39]  David M. Sobel,et al.  A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. , 2004, Psychological review.

[40]  P. White,et al.  Phenomenal causality: impressions of pulling in the visual perception of objects in motion. , 1997, The American journal of psychology.

[41]  J. Kruschke,et al.  The perception of causality: Feature binding in interacting objects , 1996 .

[42]  David Hume.  A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects , 1972 .