Michotte Research Articles

Meeting of minds: Skinner and Michotte at the International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, 1951.

This note discusses the apparently unpublished correspondence between B. F. Skinner and the Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte, preceding Skinner's visit to the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951. Skinner's letters, written in French, were intended to arrange a visit to Michotte's laboratory in Leuven (then called Louvain) in Belgium, which in the end never took place, although it seems highly likely that they met in Stockholm. There is no record of the topic of the conversations they may have had, although one possible speculation concerns discussions of causality, as both Skinner and Michotte had published work relating to this topic in the 1940s, Michotte's La Perception de la Causalité and Skinner's Superstition in the pigeon. The note also discusses the way in which Skinner's visit to the Thirteenth Congress influenced the development of the experimental analysis of behavior in both Europe and Japan.

The Early Work of Paul Fraisse: The Timing of ‘Spontaneous’ Rhythms

Abstract The article discusses Paul Fraisse’s early study of the timing of what he called ‘spontaneous’ rhythms, where people were required to perform a specified sequence of spaced taps on a response key without the times between the responses being controlled. Results come from his doctoral thesis, carried out under the supervision of Albert Michotte in Louvain/Leuven in Belgium between 1935 and 1937. In spite of the lack of timing instructions, responses were divided into ‘short times’ (around 200 ms), ‘long times’ (usually around 450 ms), and ‘pauses’ (the times between execution of consecutive rhythmic sequences). This division held over changes in the tap sequence, when different patterns of three, four, and five responses were produced. A later experiment varied total sequence duration, including the pauses, and the ratio of long to short times was approximately preserved even with marked changes in sequence duration, except at the slowest speed. Fraisse regarded the pause as having a different function from the short and long times. It changed only slightly when the pattern changed, but marked changes in the duration of the pause did not affect the pattern. Fraisse suggested it was a kind of separator, needed to maintain the rhythmic structure of the patterns, and used the idea of a temporal ‘Gestalt’ where the pause represented the ‘ground’ or ‘framework’ and the rhythmic sequence the ‘Figure ’.

Remaking “Michotte”: Reusing and Remaking Moving Images in the History of Perception Research

The starting point of this essay is a short film of an optical effect, published in 1998 by the Institute for Scientific Film (Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film [IWF]) as part of a series showing important psychological stimulus images. It traces the stimulus images in the film back to their source in a different medium and then forward through a still ongoing series of remakes. This series of cross-media remakings illustrates the frequent occurrence of remaking—rather than reusing—images in science and the role of interactivity as an epistemic value. The essay introduces the notion of the action context, a category based on a historical actor’s understanding of perception and related to the concept of affordances, to help us understand the historical value of remaking and its consequences for scientific and historiographical replication. This research is based on new archival materials—including a scientific film by Albert Michotte and Charles Dekeukeleire that is here introduced to scholarship for the first time—as well as on live interviews.

Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism.

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.

An Academic Genealogy of Psychometric Society Presidents

In this paper, we present the academic genealogy of presidents of the Psychometric Society by constructing a genealogical tree, in which Ph.D. students are encoded as descendants of their advisors. Results show that most of the presidents belong to five distinct lineages that can be traced to Wilhelm Wundt, James Angell, William James, Albert Michotte or Carl Friedrich Gauss. Important psychometricians Lee Cronbach and Charles Spearman play only a marginal role. The genealogy systematizes important historical knowledge that can be used to inform studies on the history of psychometrics and exposes the rich and multidisciplinary background of the Psychometric Society.

P 29 Brain mechanisms for phenomenal causation and oddball-perceptions – combining fMRI and high-frequent eye-tracking – A potential fundament for the first perceptual treatment of psychotic symptoms?

Brain mechanisms for phenomenal causation and oddball-perceptions – combining fMRI and high-frequent eye-tracking: a potential fundament for the first perceptual treatment of psychotic symptoms? Causality is a fundamental aspect of human perception, enabling us to make sense of events occurring in the world. Causality is also an often underestimated, although critical, feature of agency attribution, a fundamental cognitive function that is well-known to be perturbed in psychosis. The neuronal and psychophysiological correlates of causal perception are thus of particular interest for clinical neuroscientific research focused on psychotic symptomatology: Especially for research aimed at the development of potential cognitive or perceptual interventions to the core symptomatology of schizophrenia and malfunctionous agency attributions. The most important paradigm to investigate perceptual causality has been designed more than 70 years ago by Gestalt-Psychologist Albert Michotte (Michotte, 1946/1963). He has first shown that collisions of abstract moving stimuli (so-called “launch-events”), for example a collision of two billiard balls, evoke in healthy humans “Gestalt-perceptions of physical causality”, given that the motion event as a whole is contingent with the laws of mechanics/transfer of momentum (see for review e.g. Wagemans et al., 2006). Previous behavioral research indicates, that patients with psychosis show altered attributions of causality to launch-events (Tschacher and Kupper, 2006). Neuroimaging findings are further suggesting that the dysfunctional causality attributions occur in both physical and social event contexts, and are associated at the neural level with altered functional activity in the frontal cortex, as well as a disconnection of frontal and posterior cortex regions (Blakemore et al., 2003; Wende et al., 2014). However, an important confound of these studies is their reliance on explicit judgments or ratings of causality, making it impossible to infer from the results, if a higher-order cognitive (“top down”) or sensory-perceptual (“bottom up”) dysfunction is underlying the behavioral alterations. Here, eye-tracking can help to investigate the implicit component: Our paradigm is based on eye-movement monitoring at a real-time recording frequency (1 kHz, EyeLink 1000) during the observation of simultaneous launching displays (one launcher collides with two targets; one moves in a causal but non-colinear, the other one in a non-causal but colinear direction; Wende et al., 2015). Ocular (saccadic and pursuit) reactions to causal and non-causal target motions are thus for the first time compared within-trial, enabling us in a behavioral study, to confirm the Gestalt-perception hypothesis of causation (Michotte, 1946/1963), that the human visual system has encapsulated a rapidly operating and sub-attentional mechanism, which accomplishes an implicit detection of physical causality, as distinct from non-causality (“oddballs”): Both saccades (latencies) and smooth-pursuit (velocity) were biased towards the causal target motion (Wende et al., 2015). As a next step, we now aim to combine eye tracking and fMRI in order to investigate the functional neuroanatomy of this causality perception module in both healthy subjects and patients with psychosis. The long-term aim of our study set is the development of an interactive launching paradigm, to train causal inference at the sensory level in psychotic patients.

Causal events enter awareness faster than non-causal events.

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.

Causal events enter awareness faster than non-causal events

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.

Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Across the Dispositifs

Cinema and Psychoanalysis:Across the Dispositifs Lucilla Albano (bio) In the field of film studies, there are two complex areas for potential research that exist side by side within the equivocal and rather unsuitable syntagm, 'cinema and psychoanalysis'—psychoanalytic film theory and the psychoanalytic interpretation of films. Though distinct, these areas are inextricably linked, presenting us with a vast and articulated panorama of theoretical positions and possibilities for interpretative development. Cinema and Psychoanalysis. Neither the Italian language nor English—the term cinepsychoanalysis is certainly not up to the task—offer a satisfactory alternative with which to succinctly define this field of research, at once theoretical, methodological and hermeneutic. What makes the phrase so unsuitable? When asked by someone outside the field what it is I do, I cannot respond "cinema and psychoanalysis," as the majority would understand this to mean that I study films dealing with psychoanalytical or psychiatric subjects, clinical cases, symptoms, traumas, pathologies and so on, such as Suddenly, Last Summer. They would assume I dealt solely with a certain genre of film and would miss that which is significant about and peculiar to this particular branch of studies. It all began in France in the mid-1940s, with the emergence of Filmologie—the structured interdisciplinary study of cinema first advanced by sociologist Gilbert Cohen-Séat—which allowed for greater specialization and more careful attention to be paid to the problems inherent in film research. Cohen-Séat took full advantage of support from noteworthy collaborators, who included the young Edgar Morin and Roland Barthes and those with backgrounds in psychology and psychoanalysis, such as [End Page 191] psychiatrist and child psychologist Henri Wallon, experimental psychologist Albert Michotte van den Berck, and psychoanalysts Didier Anzieu and Serge Lebovici. There was also Cesare Musatti, a charismatic figure in Italian psychoanalysis, curator of the translations of the works of Sigmund Freud for the publisher house Boringhieri and President for many years of the Italian psychoanalytic society, Società Psicoanalitica Italiana, who was also a cinéphile and avid theater-goer. His Scritti sul cinema have recently been collected and some published for the first time in the journal, Revue Internationale de Filmologie.1 From the 1970s onwards, the contributions and reflections found in Revue would become central to formalizing an authentic psychoanalytic theory of cinema, with in particular the essays by Jean-Louis Baudry. It is here that certain key concepts with their roots in filmology—such as cinematic situation (a precursor to the concept of a cinematic dispositif), segregation of spaces and impression of reality, the analogy between cinema and dreams, and so forth—would be reconsidered within a psychoanalytic framework by the French scholars who provided the basis for the areas of research discussed here. These are, namely, Baudry, Christian Metz, and Raymond Bellour; in his recent book, Le Corps du cinéma (2009), Bellour defines the product of this time as a "French psychoanalytic film theory."2 This theory investigated the metapsychological effects of the relationship between the screen and the spectator with reference to theories and concepts brought to light by psychoanalysis, allowing cinema to understand itself and the conditions of its own existence. It also imposed a Freudian-Lacanian line, on whose models classical film theory is substantially (I would say, exclusively) based—a move followed in Italy and later in Anglo-American reviews, such as the journal Screen, and in feminist film theory. The first point needing specification is: Which spectator and which screen are being referred to? The answer will clarify the structure of the cinematic dispositif, which we can define as the organic matter linking the dark room, the projector, the film, the screen and the spectator, within which the spectators are captured and by which they are transformed and 'imprisoned,' like the prisoners in Plato's cave—the mythical [End Page 192] precursor to the darkened theater. The very nature of darkness, passivity and immobility, and the strength of the moving images passing before their eyes, connected by a fictional plot that is fundamental to the processes of identification and projection, cause the spectators to be pushed unconsciously toward an earlier stage in their development; towards a kind of primary narcissism...

Cognitive Binding in Schizophrenia: Weakened Integration of Temporal Intersensory Information

Cognitive functioning is based on binding processes, by which different features and elements of neurocognition are integrated and coordinated. Binding is an essential ingredient of, for instance, Gestalt perception. We have implemented a paradigm of causality perception based on the work of Albert Michotte, in which 2 identical discs move from opposite sides of a monitor, steadily toward, and then past one another. Their coincidence generates an ambiguous percept of either "streaming" or "bouncing," which the subjects (34 schizophrenia spectrum patients and 34 controls with mean age 27.9 y) were instructed to report. The latter perception is a marker of the binding processes underlying perceived causality (type I binding). In addition to this visual task, acoustic stimuli were presented at different times during the task (150 ms before and after visual coincidence), which can modulate perceived causality. This modulation by intersensory and temporally delayed stimuli is viewed as a different type of binding (type II). We show here, using a mixed-effects hierarchical analysis, that type II binding distinguishes schizophrenia spectrum patients from healthy controls, whereas type I binding does not. Type I binding may even be excessive in some patients, especially those with positive symptoms; Type II binding, however, was generally attenuated in patients. The present findings point to ways in which the disconnection (or Gestalt) hypothesis of schizophrenia can be refined, suggesting more specific markers of neurocognitive functioning and potential targets of treatment.

Causation From Perception

Beginning with the research of Albert Michotte, investigators have identified simple perceptual events that observers report as causal. For example, suppose a square moves across a screen and comes to a halt when it makes contact with a second square. If the second square then begins moving in the same direction, observers sometimes report that the first square “pushed” the second or “caused it to move.” Based on such reports, Michotte claimed that people perceive causality, and a number of psychologists and philosophers have followed his lead. This article examines Michotte’s hypothesis by comparing it with its chief rival: Observers possess representations of pushings, pullings, and other events in long-term memory. A Michottean display triggers one of these representations, and the representation classifies the display as an instance of pushing (or pulling, etc.). According to this second explanation, recognizing an event as a pushing is similar to classifying an object as a cup or a dog. Data relevant to this debate come from infant and animal studies, cognitive and neuropsychological dissociation experiments, and studies of context effects and individual differences. However, a review of research in these paradigms finds no reason to prefer Michotte’s theory over its competitor.

THE VISUAL EXPERIENCE OF CAUSATION

The thesis that we can visually perceive causal relations is distinct from the thesis that visual experiences can represent causal relations. I defend the latter thesis about visual experience, and argue that although they are suggestive, the data provided by Albert Michotte's experiments on perceptual causality do not establish this thesis. Turning to the perception of causality, I defend the claim that we can perceive causation against the objection that its arcane features are unlikely to be represented in experience.

Leipzig and Louvain University in Belgium

Experimental psychology was introduced at the University of Louvain in 1891 under the influence of Desire J. Mercier, a philosopher, who wanted to bridge the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas with experimental psychology. As the head of the philosophy program at the Louvain University, Mercier sent Armand Thiery, his collaborator, to Leipzig in order to acquaint him with Wundt's physiological psychology and laboratory. Upon his return from Germany Thiery organized a psychological laboratory at the Louvain University and offered a course in psychophysiology. Thiery headed the experimental program at Louvain for over ten years but he was more interested in philosophical and theoretical problems than in laboratory investigations. His successor, Albert Michotte, was wholeheartedly committed to laboratory experimentation and research. He also studied in Leipzig but was more influenced by Kulpe than by Wundt. Under Michotte's leadership, which lasted over 50 years, Louvain laboratory became one of the most active and original research centers in Europe.

Albert Michotte and Memory

ABSTRACT Albert Michotte, known primarily for his research in perception, also carried out several experiments in logical mebory' (concptual or intellectual memory). He was strongly influenced by Kulpe, feeling that the thought processes were autonomous, in contradiction to more traditional and elementary conceptions of mental activity. His experiments, using paired-associate techniques' to stuWy the place of thoughtsin. logical memory, made note of time to complete each word pair; interval between presentation and test; and the. subjects° introspections about the experience:, perceptions of they ,.word pair, and trains of thought engendered by the presentation of a single word. Significant findings were the different patterns of conscious phenomena each subject used in recalling the second word of the pairs, regardless of almost identical recall accuracy, and the large number of intermediary phenomena (relational and non-relational thought, visual imagery, and false Words) that made up the recall procesS. Michotte concluded that relational thought was necessary to logical Temory, but that it could not stand alone. Michottegs emphasis on memory as a contributor to action (one experiment was carried 'on in everyday situations instead.of the laboratory) and his discovery of the multiplicity of means by which different individuals arrive at the same outcome are still, of significance to current memory research. (MR)

"Causalite, permanence et realite phenomenales," by A. Michotte and others

"Causalite, permanence et realite phenomenales," by A. Michotte and others