Abstract
Philosophers have long argued that causality cannot be directly observed but requires a conscious inference (Hume, 1967). Albert Michotte however developed numerous visual phenomena in which people seemed to perceive causality akin to primary visual properties like colour or motion (Michotte, 1946). Michotte claimed that the perception of causality did not require a conscious, deliberate inference but, working over 70 years ago, he did not have access to the experimental methods to test this claim. Here we employ Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS)—an interocular suppression technique to render stimuli invisible (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005)—to test whether causal events enter awareness faster than non-causal events. We presented observers with ‘causal’ and ‘non-causal’ events, and found consistent evidence that participants become aware of causal events more rapidly than non-causal events. Our results suggest that, whilst causality must be inferred from sensory evidence, this inference might be computed at low levels of perceptual processing, and does not depend on a deliberative conscious evaluation of the stimulus. This work therefore supports Michotte’s contention that, like colour or motion, causality is an immediate property of our perception of the world.
Highlights
One of the first lessons we instill in statistics courses is that a ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation.’ Philosophically speaking the lesson should go much deeper than that
We presented observers with launching and passing events while these were rendered invisible through Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS)
The results of Experiments 1 and 2 both suggest that the human visual system shows differential sensitivity to events that are more or less able to elicit causal percepts
Summary
One of the first lessons we instill in statistics courses is that a ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation.’ Philosophically speaking the lesson should go much deeper than that. Speaking the lesson should go much deeper than that. David Hume famously argued that causality was not something that could be observed at all. Even if we manipulate one variable such that it consistently leads to a certain outcome, we can use reason to infer causality from this contingency, but our senses cannot observe the causal interaction (Hume, 1967). Argues that causality is not a feature of the world, but is a phenomenon we experience because our minds bring the concept of causality to the world (Kant, 1783). The ‘virtual’ nature of our experience of the world is illustrated by the perception of colour, in which it is clear that ‘the rays, to speak properly, are not colored’
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