The larger the cause,the larger the effect: evidence of speed judgment biases in causal scenarios |
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Authors: | Michele Vicovaro Luca Battaglini Giulia Parovel |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy michele.vicovaro@unipd.ithttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-9656-1640;3. Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy;4. Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences, University of Siena, Siena, Italy |
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Abstract: | ABSTRACT When two motions appear to be causally related, the spatiotemporal features of motions are sometimes distorted in order to increase the consistency with causal impressions. Here, in four experiments, we tested if varying the speed of an object A could affect the judged speed of an object B that appeared to be causally related to A. Participants were presented with classic launching stimuli (Experiment 1), a variant of launching stimuli in which A could move with uniformly accelerated or decelerated motion (Experiment 2), non-launching stimuli that elicited a causal impression (Experiment 3), and stimuli showing a three-object launching event (Experiment 4). Main results showed that the judged speed of B was systematically biased towards the speed of A, and moreover that the judged speed of B depended on the average speed of A, rather than on the speed of A at the moment of collision as it would be predicted by Newtonian mechanics. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that internal representations of causal events based on property transmission (for instance, impetus) can affect judgments of the low-level properties of causal scenarios. |
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Keywords: | Causal perception causality speed perception Naïve physics launching effect |
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