Visual impressions of generative transmission

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that stimuli in which a moving object (A) contacts a stationary one (B) and stops, and object B then moves off in the same direction, give rise to a causal impression: object A is perceived as producing the motion of object B. This impression is weakened or does not occur if there is a delay between A contacting B and B moving, or if there is a spatial gap between B and the location at which A stops. It is shown that a strong causal impression can occur despite the presence of both gap and delay if there are cues to generative transmission of causal influence from A to B. The cues investigated were successive colour change of a series of objects filling the gap between A and B. Reported causal impressions were stronger with the colour change stimuli than with stimuli in which the objects were present but did not change colour, and stronger if the colour change proceeded from A to B than if it proceeded in the opposite direction. Reported causal impressions increased in strength as the number of objects involved in the colour change increased, consistent with the hypothesis that the colour change is a cue to a process of transmission, and inconsistent with the hypothesis that it is perceived or inferred as involving a chain of causal relations. Other kinds of changes to object properties—a small upward motion, shrinkage without moving, and disappearance—yielded similar results. It appears that any rapid sequential change in object properties in the direction of causal influence can function to give rise to the visual impression of generative transmission. The possible role of apparent motion is discussed.     

Perceived causality and perceived force: Same or different?

Visually perceived interactions between objects, such as animated versions of billiard ball collisions, give rise to causal impressions, impressions that one object produces some effect in another, and force impressions, impressions that one object exerts a certain amount of force on another. In four experiments, evidence for strong divergence between these two impressions is reported. Manipulations of relative direction of motion and point of contact between the objects had different effects on the causal and force impressions (Experiment 1); delay between one object contacting another and the latter starting to move had a stronger effect on the causal impression than on the force impression (Experiment 2); a context of other moving objects significantly weakened the causal impression but not the force impression (Experiment 3); and there was an inverse relation between an impression of one object penetrating another and the amount of force the former was perceived as exerting on the latter (Experiment 4). These findings are explained in terms of differential effects of instructions on attention, and also in terms of differences in meaning between force and causality.     

Visual impressions of force exerted by one object on another when the objects do not come into contact

Simple animations in which one object contacts another give rise to visual impressions that the former object causes the outcome for the latter, and that the former object is exerting force on the latter. How does the impression of force relate to the impression of causality? The main aim of this research was to investigate this issue using stimuli in which there is a gap between the objects at closest approach. Delay between the first object stopping and the second object starting to move had a strong effect on reported force impressions, which is consistent with findings of research on the causal impression. However, the reported force impression was little affected by either the size of the gap or the presence and features of an object in the gap, whereas the causal impression was strongly affected by both. The findings support the conclusion that the force impression and the causal impression are distinct components of the visual interpretation of the stimulus.     

Material objects and essential bundle theory

In this paper we present a new metaphysical theory of material objects. On our theory, objects are bundles of property instances, where those properties give the nature or essence of that object. We call the theory essential bundle theory. Property possession is not analysed as bundle-membership, as in traditional bundle theories, since accidental properties are not included in the object’s bundle. We have a different story to tell about accidental property possession. This move reaps many benefits. Essential bundle theory delivers a simple theory of the essential properties of material objects; an explanation of how object coincidence can arise; an actual-world ground for modal differences between coincident objects; a simple story about intrinsic properties; and a plausible account of certain ubiquitous cases of causal overdetermination.     

Toward a causal realist account of causal understanding

Within a limited domain, humans can perceive causal relations directly. The term causal realism is used to denote this psychological hypothesis. The domain of causal realism is in actions upon objects and haptic perception of the effects of those actions: When we act upon an object we cannot be mistaken about the fact that we are acting upon it and perceive the causal relation directly through mechanoreceptors. Experiences of actions upon objects give rise to causal knowledge that can be used in the interpretation of perceptual input. Phenomenal causality, the occurrence of causal impressions in visual perception, is a product of the application of acquired causal knowledge in the automatic perceptual interpretation of appropriate stimuli. Causal realism could constitute the foundation on which all causal perception, judgment, inference, attribution, and knowledge develop.     

The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's internal parts to its causal properties without being given verbal labels for objects or being shown that insides and causal properties covaried. Experiment 3 found that 4-year-olds chose an object with the same internal part over one with the same external property when asked which object had the same causal property as the target (which had both the internal part and external property). Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that 4-year-olds made similar inferences from causal properties to internal parts, but 3-year-olds relied more on objects' external perceptual appearance. These results suggest that by the age of 4, children have developed an understanding of a relation between an artifact's internal parts and its causal properties.     

Impressions of force in visual perception of collision events: A test of the causal asymmetry hypothesis

When two objects interact they exert equal and opposite forces on each other. According to the causal asymmetry hypothesis, however, when one object has been identified as causal and the other as that in which the effect occurs, the causal object is perceived as exerting greater force on the effect object than the latter is perceived as exerting on the former. An example of this is a stimulus in which one object moves toward another stationary one, and when contact occurs the former stops and the latter moves away. In this situation the initially moving object is identified as causal, so the causal asymmetry hypothesis predicts that more force will be judged to be exerted by the moving object on the stationary one than by the stationary one on the moving one. Participants’ judgments consistently supported this hypothesis for a variety of stimuli in which kinematic parameters were varied, even when the initially moving object reversed direction after contact.     

Visual impressions of causality: Effects of manipulating the direction of the target object's motion in a collision event

Stimuli in which a moving object (A) contacts a stationary one (B) and the latter then moves off tend to give rise to visual impressions of causality. In two experiments the angle of Object B's path of motion to that of Object A was manipulated, and in one of these the point of contact of Object A with Object B was also manipulated. The ampliation hypothesis (Michotte, 1963) predicts that the causal impression should be strongest when Object B continues Object A's direction of motion, regardless of point of contact. In fact the causal impression was strongest when the angle of Object B's motion matched the angle that would actually occur for the point of contact in the stimulus. This supports a hypothesis that the causal impression is a product of experience with real object collisions.     

Visual impressions of active and inanimate resistance to impact from a moving object

ABSTRACT

Images of moving objects presented on computer screens may be perceived as animate or inanimate. A simple hypothesis, consistent with much research evidence, is that objects are perceived as inanimate if there is a visible external contact from another object immediately prior to the onset of motion, and as animate if that is not the case. Evidence is reported that is not consistent with that hypothesis. Objects (targets) moving on contact from another object (launcher) were perceived as actively resisting the impact of the launcher on them if the targets slowed rapidly. Rapid slowing is consistent with the laws of mechanics for objects moving in an environment that offers friction and air resistance. Despite that, ratings of inanimate motion were lower than ratings of active resistance for objects that slowed rapidly. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that there is a perceptual impression of active (animate) resistance that is evoked by the kinematic pattern of rapid slowing from an initial speed after contact from another object.     

Launching the effect: Representations of causal movements are influenced by what they lead to

We investigated whether the representation of an observed causal movement is influenced by its observed effect. Subjects watched displays showing collisions between two objects. In this 'launching event' (Michotte, 1946/1963), one of the two objects (Object A) started to move and set a second, initially stationary, object (Object B) into motion, which gave a strong impression of apparent causality. The apparent effectiveness of A's movement was manipulated by varying the velocities of A and B. When the velocity of B was higher than that of A, the effectiveness of the collision was high; when it was smaller it was low. Then, subjects were asked to reproduce the velocity of the causal movement. Reproduced velocity followed the velocity of both Object A and Object B, which supports the hypothesis that the effect of a movement is integrated with its apparent cause. However, when apparent causality was reduced by changing the direction of motion of B or by covering the point of collision, the influence of the effect on the representation of the cause persisted, suggesting that retroactive interference may account for the findings. The interference effect could not be reduced to temporal recency or spatial integration and was not obtained in the reverse temporal order (proactive interference). Rather, the two successive movements were blended in memory.     

The causal asymmetry

It is hypothesized that there is a pervasive and fundamental bias in humans' understanding of physical causation: Once the roles of cause and effect are assigned to objects in interactions, people tend to overestimate the strength and importance of the causal object and underestimate that of the effect object in bringing about the outcome. This bias is termed the causal asymmetry. Evidence for this bias is reviewed in several domains, including visual impressions of causal relations, reasoning about Newton's third law in naive physics problems, concepts underlying linguistic expressions of causality, and research in causal judgment from contingency information. Although there might be an equivalent to the causal asymmetry in the domain of social causality, there are too many uncertainties in the evidence for conclusions to be drawn.     

Spurious Causal Kinds: A Problem for the Causal-Power Conception of Kinds

There is an assumption common in the philosophy of mind literature that kinds in our sciences—or causal kinds, at least—are individuated by the causal powers that objects have in virtue of the properties they instantiate. While this assumption might not be problematic by itself, some authors take the assumption to mean that falling under a kind and instantiating a property amount to the same thing. I call this assumption the “Property-Kind Individuation Principle”. A problem with this principle arises because there are cases where we can sort objects by their possession of common causal powers, and yet those objects do not intuitively form a causal kind. In this short note, I discuss why the Property-Kind Individuation Principle is thus not a warranted metaphysical assumption.     

Gesturing and naming: the use of functional knowledge in object identification

Studies using functional imaging show reliable activation of premotor cortex when observers view manipulable objects. This result has led to the view that knowledge of object function, particularly the actions associated with the typical use of objects, may play a causal role in object identification. To obtain relevant evidence regarding this causal role, we asked subjects to learn gesture-color associations and then attempt to identify objects presented in colors denoting functional gestures that were congruent or incongruent with the objects' use. A strong congruency effect was observed when subjects gestured the use of an object, but not when they named an object. We conclude that our procedure constitutes a sensitive measure of the recruitment and causal role of functional knowledge and that this recruitment is not present during object naming. Preliminary evidence, however, indicates that gestures evoked by the volumetric shape of an object do contribute to object naming.     

Visual causal impressions in the perception of several moving objects

Several kinds of visual causal impressions occur when people observe stimuli involving objects in motion. It is hypothesized that these impressions occur when the visual system avoids coincidences by matching the observable kinematic features of the stimulus to a template of a physical mechanism. This was tested by constructing a stimulus in which several spatially separated objects move in a coordinated manner. Variations on this stimulus were constructed such that some were inconsistent with a possible physical mechanism that could explain the motions of the objects and others were consistent with it. Mechanism‐inconsistent variations yielded significantly lower ratings of the causal impression and mechanism‐consistent variations did not, supporting the hypothesis. Misperceptions of features of the stimulus were also reported by a majority of participants, and the nature of these misperceptions is also consistent with the hypothesis that the stimulus is interpreted as a representation of a kind of physical mechanism.     

Amodal causal capture in the tunnel effect

In addition to identifying individual objects in the world, the visual system must also characterize the relationships between objects, for instance when objects occlude one another or cause one another to move. Here we explored the relationship between perceived causality and occlusion. Can one perceive causality in an occluded location? In several experiments, observers judged whether a centrally presented event involved a single object passing behind an occluder, or one object causally launching another (out of view and behind the occluder). With no additional context, the centrally presented event was typically judged as a non-causal pass, even when the occluding and disoccluding objects were different colors--an illusion known as the 'tunnel effect' that results from spatiotemporal continuity. However, when a synchronized context event involved an unambiguous causal launch, participants perceived a causal launch behind the occluder. This percept of an occluded causal interaction could also be driven by grouping and synchrony cues in the absence of any explicitly causal interaction. These results reinforce the hypothesis that causality is an aspect of perception. It is among the interpretations of the world that are independently available to vision when resolving ambiguity, and that the visual system can 'fill in' amodally.     

A temporal same-object advantage in the tunnel effect: facilitated change detection for persisting objects

Meaningful visual experience requires computations that identify objects as the same persisting individuals over time, motion, occlusion, and featural change. This article explores these computations in the tunnel effect: When an object moves behind an occluder, and then an object later emerges following a consistent trajectory, observers irresistibly perceive a persisting object, even when the pre- and postocclusion views contrast featurally. This article introduces a new change detection method for quantifying percepts of the tunnel effect. Observers had to detect color changes in displays where several objects oscillated behind occluders and occasionally changed color. Across comparisons with several types of spatiotemporal gaps, as well as manipulations of occlusion versus implosion, performance was better when objects' kinematics gave the impression of a persisting individual. The results reveal a temporal same-object advantage: better change detection across temporal scene fragments bound into the same persisting object representations. This suggests that persisting objects are the underlying units of visual memory.     

Domain-Specific Principles Affect Learning and Transfer in Children

In this paper I discuss the curious lack of contact between developmental psychologists studying the principles of early learning and those concentrating an later learning in children, where predispositions to learn certain types of concepts are less readily discussed. Instead, there is tacit agreement that learning and transfer mechanisms are content-independent and age-dependent. I argue here that one cannot study learning and transfer in a vacuum and that children's ability to learn is intimately dependent on what they are required to learn and the context in which they must learn it. Specifically, I argue that children learn and transfer readily, even in traditional laboratory settings, if they are required to extend their knowledge about causal mechanisms that they already understand. This point is illustrated in a series of studies with children from 1 to 3 years of age learning about simple mechanisms of physical causality (pushing-pulling, wetting, cutting, etc.). In addition, I document children's difficulty learning about causally impossible events, such as pulling with strings that do not appear to make contact with the object they are pulling. Even young children transfer on the basis of deep structural principles rather than perceptual features when they have access to the requisite domain-specific knowledge. I argue that a search for causal explanations is the basis of broad understanding, of wide patterns of generalization, and of flexible transfer and creative inferential projections—in sum, the essential elements of meaningful learning.     

物体表征强度对基于动态物体的注意的影响

基于物体的注意已得到许多静态物体实验的证实, 然而, 对注意分配如何受动态物体影响的研究较少, 存在提示物体假设和动态更新假设两种观点。提示物体假设认为基于物体的注意由最初的物体决定, 而动态更新假设则认为由变化之后的物体决定。动态物体的注意研究还发现了即时物体效应, 即注意基于新物体进行。对于物体变化时注意究竟基于旧物体还是新物体, 新旧物体的相对物体表征强度在其中起决定作用; 当提示物体表征较强时表现为提示物体(即旧物体)决定注意分配, 而当即时物体表征较强时表现为即时物体(即新物体)决定注意分配。相对物体表征强度的概念对理解物体动态变化情况下基于物体的注意的分配以及解决相关理论之冲突可能有重要作用。     

Measuring causal perception: connections to representational momentum?

In a collision between two objects, we can perceive not only low-level properties, such as color and motion, but also the seemingly high-level property of causality. It has proven difficult, however, to measure causal perception in a quantitatively rigorous way which goes beyond perceptual reports. Here we focus on the possibility of measuring perceived causality using the phenomenon of representational momentum (RM). Recent studies suggest a relationship between causal perception and RM, based on the fact that RM appears to be attenuated for causally 'launched' objects. This is explained by appeal to the visual expectation that a 'launched' object is inert and thus should eventually cease its movement after a collision, without a source of self-propulsion. We first replicated these demonstrations, and then evaluated this alleged connection by exploring RM for different types of displays, including the contrast between causal launching and non-causal 'passing'. These experiments suggest that the RM-attenuation effect is not a pure measure of causal perception, but rather may reflect lower-level spatiotemporal correlates of only some causal displays. We conclude by discussing the strengths and pitfalls of various methods of measuring causal perception.     

Cause or effect: What matters? How 12‐month‐old infants learn to categorize artifacts

This paper investigates the role of cause and effect relations for infants' learning about artifacts. Two experiments tested whether 12‐month‐olds categorized a given set of unfamiliar artifacts according to overall similarity and/or according to part similarity, depending on what kind of video demonstration was presented before the start of the categorization task. In both experiments, the actions performed with objects were accompanied by interesting effects but the causal relation between object‐structure and effects was teased apart. In one video demonstration (Expt 1), the experimenter used the object part to produce some kind of effect in a causally plausible way. In another video demonstration (Expt 2), the experimenter performed similar actions with the same objects as in Expt 1, followed by the same effects as before. Importantly, however, no plausible cause–effect relation was provided this time. Only infants participating in Expt 1 categorized the set of unfamiliar objects according to part similarity. This finding suggests that 12‐month‐olds attend to the causal relation between specific object parts and their functional use when categorizing artifacts, rather than merely associating form‐characteristics with an interesting effect.