Evidence for a Distinction between Judged and Perceived Causality

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Abstract
Two experiments investigated Michotte's launch event, in which successive motion of two objects appears to evoke an immediate perception that the first motion caused the second, as in a collision. Launching was embedded in event sequences where a third event (a colour change of the second object) was established as a competing predictor of the second motion, in an attempt to see whether subjects’ learning of alternative predictive relationships would influence their causal impressions of launch events. In Experiment 1 subjects saw launch events in which temporal contiguity at the point of impact was varied so that an impact was varied so that an impact itself did not reliably predict when the second object would move. Half of these scenes, however, contained a colour change of the second object which did reliably predict when it would move. In accordance with Michotte's theory, subjects’ ratings of the degree of perceived causality were not affected by the colour change. In Experiment 2 subjects saw scenes that contained launch events with or without temporal contiguity and a colour change. These were interspersed with events in which a colour change alone did or did not precede the second motion. Thus, movement of the second object was either contingent on or independent of the impact. Subjects repeatedly (a) rated perceived causality in single launch events and (b) judged the necessity of collisions for movement in the overall set of events. These responses dissociated, in that ratings type (a) showed only a substantial contiguity effect, whereas judgements of type (b) showed both a contingency and a much smaller contiguity effect. These results appear to support a distinction between judged and perceived causality and are discussed with respect to Michotte's theory of direct causal perception.

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