Attention and Context in Causal Event Perception

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

In addition to perceiving the colors, shapes, and motions of objects in the world, we can also perceive higher-level properties such as causality, as when we see one object hit another object, causing it to move. Properties such as causality go beyond the objective kinematics of the displays, yet can be reliably perceived even in simple scenes consisting of moving 2D geometric shapes. Causal perception of this sort is ubiquitous in everyday life, from billiard balls to traffic collisions, but is not understood as well as the perception of properties such as color and shape. The goal of the proposed research is to explore the nature of causal event perception, focusing on the perception of causality in 'launching' displays. Computer- based experiments with normal adult observers are proposed to investigate three primary questions. First, to what degree is attention required to perceive such events? Second, to what degree do such events actually mediate the capture events? Third, how does the visual system use contextual information when detecting causal events? These questions are addressed using a variety of experimental tools, including variants of existing paradigms (visual search tasks with repeating dynamic events; sustained inattentional blindness' tasks) as well as novel paradigms developed to study the role of contextual information from other nearby events. This new research will help to determine the nature of such perceptual processing, which suggests new ways to think about the purpose of visual perception: just as the visual system works to recover the physical structure of the world by 'inferring' properties such as 3D shape, so too might it work to recover the causal structure of the world by 'inferring' properties such as causality.