Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism.

Kristof Meding,Bernhard Schölkopf,Sebastian A Bruijns,Philipp Berens,Felix A Wichmann

doi:10.1177/2041669520927038

Kristof Meding, Bernhard Schölkopf + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669520927038

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Abstract

One of the most important tasks for humans is the attribution of causes and effects in all wakes of life. The first systematical study of visual perception of causality—often referred to as phenomenal causality—was done by Albert Michotte using his now well-known launching events paradigm. Launching events are the seeming collision and seeming transfer of movement between two objects—abstract, featureless stimuli (“objects”) in Michotte’s original experiments. Here, we study the relation between causal ratings for launching events in Michotte’s setting and launching collisions in a photorealistically computer-rendered setting. We presented launching events with differing temporal gaps, the same launching processes with photorealistic billiard balls, as well as photorealistic billiard balls with realistic motion dynamics, that is, an initial rebound of the first ball after collision and a short sliding phase of the second ball due to momentum and friction. We found that providing the normal launching stimulus with realistic visuals led to lower causal ratings, but realistic visuals together with realistic motion dynamics evoked higher ratings. Two-dimensional versus three-dimensional presentation, on the other hand, did not affect phenomenal causality. We discuss our results in terms of intuitive physics as well as cue conflict.

Highlights

One of the most important tasks for humans is the attribution of causes and effects in all wakes of life
The purpose of this study is to study the relationship between Michotte launching events and physical realism in terms of both visual surface features and motion dynamics
We explored the effects of substituting realistic visuals and physics into Michotte launching displays

Summary

Introduction

One of the most important tasks for humans is the attribution of causes and effects in all wakes of life. One of the prototypical and simplest cause–effect pairs is a collision between two objects Displays of these events, so-called launching stimuli, are regarded as the canonical demonstration of causal perception (Wagemans et al, 2006). One of the displays he used became known as launching displays: two shapes (squares, more commonly disks) starting some distance apart, one moving toward the other, at the point of contact the first disk stops and the second one continues its motion He manipulated the properties of these displays with great experimental finesse and established many details about perceived causality. They found “that impressions of causation depend predominantly on the core features and not the peripheral features of event sequences.” they noted that it would be important to better match properties in the animated conditions to the properties in the real-world conditions they used—exactly what we do in our study

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