Causal illusions and forces

Emory University, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

A fundamental issue in cognitive science is understanding how people attribute a causal relationship to events. People sometimes sense causal connections where they do not exist, as in superstitious behavior or pseudoscientific beliefs. They also factor into serious psychological conditions, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or pathological gambling, conditions characterized by unrealistically high beliefs of causal control. Despite their pervasiveness, causal illusions are neglected by most theories of causation because these theories are intended to explain how people infer causal relations that actually exist in the world, not causation that exists only in the mind of the perceiver. The proposed research seeks to address this gap. In particular, the investigator explores the idea that causal illusions arise because people's causal representations are based on the feeling of force, and people make mistakes about causation because they often rely on cross-modal information to infer forces. Forces are understood though the sense of touch (or haptics), suggesting that haptics play a foundational role in higher-order cognition by providing a perceptual basis for the notion of causation. Much recent research indicates that the sense of touch can be triggered not only through direct physical contact with the body, but also indirectly through other modalities, such as sight. Such cross-modal interactions might explain people's vulnerability to causal illusions: because forces cannot be directly felt though vision, people may make mistakes when they use visual information to infer forces. The proposed research will also investigate the hypothesis that people's judgments of causation are based on two sources of information, one based on the impression of force and a second, based on spatial relations, which determines whether a mechanism exists for the transmission of the force. Causal illusions are proposed to occur when the impression of force suggests causation but lack of appropriate spatial relations implies that the impression of force is not substantiated. The hypothesis is tested by examining not only people's sensitivity to physical forces, but also their sensitivity to spatial cues. The proposed research reframes the discussion in the causation literature from an analysis of how the cognitive system achieves accurate representations of the world to an analysis of how and why the system can make mistakes and fall prey to superstitions, quackery, and illusions. Results of the behavioral work will also offer strong suggestions about how the notion of causation might be realized in the brain and help guide research examining the neural basis of causal thought. The work may also lead to better treatment of psychological conditions associated with unrealistic beliefs about causal control (for example, in gambling addiction). The animations and haptic controller programs developed for this research will be freely available for researchers in the wider scientific community.