ArticleCognition2020
Retinotopic adaptation reveals distinct categories of causal perception.
Article in Cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ensemble size perception as a case study of the bounds of adaptation.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- The unity of sense and mind: A review of cross-domain mapping.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Causal Perception(s).Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Michotte's research on perceptual impressions of causality: a registered replication study.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The influence of a moving object's location on object identity judgments.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2025Article
- Article
- Invariant representations in abstract concept grounding - the physical world in grounded cognition.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Size adaptation: Do you know it when you see it?Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Exploring the influence of self-identification on perceptual judgments of physical and social causality.PeerJ · 2024Article
- A comparative study of causal perception in Guinea baboons (Papio papio) and human adults.PloS one · 2024Article
- A Phone in a Basket Looks Like a Knife in a Cup: Role-Filler Independence in Visual Processing.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- More than a moment: What does it mean to call something an 'event'?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- The functions of consciousness in visual processing.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- The effect of perceptual history on the interpretation of causality.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representations.Memory & cognition · 2021Article
- The Language of Vision.Perception · 2021Article
- Gaining knowledge mediates changes in perception (without differences in attention): A case for perceptual learning.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2016Article
- Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism.i-PerceptionArticle
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. A prototypical example of causal perception is the 'launching effect': one object (A) moves toward a stationary second object (B) until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the same direction. Beyond these motions themselves - and regardless of any higher-level beliefs - this display induces a vivid visual impression of causality, wherein A is seen to cause B's motion. Do such percepts reflect a unitary category of visual processing, or might there be multiple distinct forms of causal perception? While launching is often simply equated with causal perception, researchers have sometimes described other phenomena such as 'triggering' (in which B moves faster than A) and 'entraining' (in which A continues to move alongside B). We used psychophysical methods to determine whether these labels really carve visual processing at its joints, and how putatively different forms of causal perception relate to each other. Previous research demonstrated retinotopically specific adaptation to causality: exposure to causal launching makes subsequent ambiguous events in that same location more likely to be seen as non-causal 'passing'. Here, after replicating this effect, we show that exposure to triggering also yields retinotopically specific adaptation for subsequent ambiguous launching displays, but that exposure to entraining does not. Collectively, these results reveal that visual processing distinguishes some (but not all) types of causal interactions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.