Anne Schlottmann

Evidence for a Distinction between Judged and Perceived Causality

Two experiments investigated Michottes 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 Michottes 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 Michottes theory of direct causal perception.

An information integration approach to phenomenal causality

Phenomenal causality was studied by using Michottes launch event, in which successive motion of two objects evokes an immediate perception that the first motion causes the second. Information integration theory was used to address the complementary issues of invariant perceptual structure and individual differences in phenomenal causality. Three informational cues were varied conjointly: temporal and spatial contiguity of the two motions, and the ratio of their speeds. The dependent measure was a judgment of degree of causality or naturalness. The results showed that individual differences were related to these instruction conditions; the subjects showed five distinctive response patterns. Two were the modal patterns elicited by the instructions, and the others fell in between. The averaging model gave a good account of the data, with meaningful parameter estimates. Individual differences were localized in cueevaluation, whereas theirintegration into a unified judgment followed an invariant averaging rule. The results allow some reconciliation between Michotte and his critics.

Seeing It Happen and Knowing How It Works: How Children Understand the Relation between Perceptual Causality and Underlying Mechanism.

Two experiments studied how 5- to 10-year-olds integrate perceptual causality with their knowledge of the underlying causal mechanism. Children learned about 2 devices by which a ball dropped into one end of a box made a bell ring at the other end, either immediately (contiguous mechanism) or after a delay (noncontiguous mechanism). When 1 ball was dropped first and a 2nd ball was dropped after a delay, and then the bell rang immediately, 5- and 7-year-olds chose the contiguous cause regardless of the mechanism inside. This was not due to lack of specific knowledge or problems with salient distractors. The results suggest a link between temporal contiguity and causality in childrens understanding. Children also considered causal mechanism, in agreement with previous research, but they may not understand that mechanism is superordinate to perceptual cues for causality.

Do 9-month-olds perceive causation-at-a-distance ?

Humans understand mechanical events to involve physical bodies interacting by contact, but intentional events involve agents that can also interact at a distance. We investigated infant sensitivity to causality in a simple event in which one agent appears to react to another without contact. Infants 9 months old were habituated to one of two events involving a computer-animated red square moving nonrigidly—like a caterpillar—towards a green square. In the ‘reaction event’, the green object moved in turn before the red one stopped, while in the ‘pause event’ the green object moved after the red one stopped. After habituation, each infant saw the habituation movie played in reverse. This test involved identical spatiotemporal changes for reaction and pause event, but the reversed reaction additionally involved a change in the causal roles. Infants dis-habituated to reversal of the reaction but not the pause event, a result which suggests sensitivity to causation-at-a-distance. This ability could support development of social cognition and theory of mind.

Goal attribution to schematic animals: do 6-month-olds perceive biological motion as animate?

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6-month-olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched, infants reacted more to movement towards a new goal than a new location - but only if the square moved non-rigidly and rhythmically, in a schematic version of bio-mechanical movement older observers describe as animal-like (Michotte, 1963). Goal attribution was specific to schematic animal motion: It did not occur if the square moved rigidly with the same rhythm as the animate stimulus, or if the square had the same amount of non-rigid deformation, but in an inanimate configuration. The data would seem to show that perception of schematic animal motion is linked to a system for psychological reasoning from infancy. This in turn suggests that 6-month-olds may already interpret biological motion as animate.

Children's Judgments of Expected Value.

Expected value judgments of 5-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds were studied by using an information integration approach. Children saw roulette-type games with prizes of crayons. They made judgments on a continuous scale of how happy a puppet playing the game would be. In one task, probability and value of a single winning outcome were varied factorially. All ages took both cues into account. Young children used an additive integration rule, whereas children 8 years and older used the multiplying rule as predicted by mathematical theory. A 2nd task contained games with both 1 and 2 alternative prizes. At all ages, data patterns were similar to the normative predictions. Even young children showed some understanding of probability dependence. A serial version of the addition strategy may contribute to advanced performance in the 2-prize task

Is perception of causality modular

Scholl and Tremoulet1 recently claimed that perceptual causality (PC) is modular. This is an interesting update of Michotte’s position that we perceive (not infer) cause-and-effect in simple motion configurations, based on an innate tendency that is independent of learnt interpretation2. Scholl and Tremoulet focus on adult data, avoiding innateness arguments. In contrast to their view, I can see some conceptual justification for an innate modular process, but do not believe we can decide about modularity in adults.

How children reason about gains and losses : Framing effects in judgement and choice

Three experiments considered how the positive or negative framing of decisions affects children’s EV (expected value) judgements and choices. In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-year-olds chose between a sure gain and a gamble or between a sure loss and a gamble, all with the same EV. Children preferred the sure thing more in the positive than negative frame, as also appears for adults. In Experiment 2, both frames involved potential losses. In their judgements, 6- and 9-year-olds used the normative multiplication rule for integrating risk and amount at risk, with minor frame differences, but when choosing between the same options, they were risk-averse in the save, risk-seeking in the loss frame. In Experiment 3, 5-year-olds used multiplication for saves, with an irregular pattern for losses. Overall, children’s judgements conform closely to normativity. At the same time, children’s choices, like adults’, show non-normative framing effects. This decalage may reflect the involvement of more intuitive processes in j...

Children's judgements of gambles: A disordinal violation of utility

Violations of utility are often attributed to peoples differential reactions to risk versus certainty or uncertainty, or more generally to the way that people perceive outcomes and consequences. However; a core feature of utility is additivity, and violations may also occur because of averaging effects. Averaging is pervasive in intuitive riskless judgement throughout many domains, as shown with Andersons Information Integration approach. The present study extends these findings to judgement under risk. Five- to 10-year old children showed a disordinal violation of utility because they averaged the part worths of duplex gambles rather than add them, as adults do, and as normatively prescribed. Thus adults realized that two prizes are better than one, but children preferred a high chance to win one prize to the same gamble plus an additional small chance to win a second prize. This result suggests that an additive operator may not be a natural component of the intuitive psychological concept of expected value that emerges in childhood. The implications of a developmental perspective for the :study of judgement and decision are discussed. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Emerging perception of causality in action-and-reaction sequences from 4 to 6 months of age: is it domain-specific?

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a distance. Primarily, our study sought to determine from what age infants see the causal structure of this reaction event. In addition, we looked at whether this causal percept depends on an animate style of motion and whether it correlates with tasks assessing goal perception and goal-directed action. Infants saw either causal reactions or noncausal delayed control events in which blue started some time after red stopped. These events involved squares that moved either rigidly or nonrigidly in an apparently animate manner. After habituation to one of the four events, infants were tested on reversal of the habituation event. Spatiotemporal features reversed for all events, but causal roles changed only in reversed reactions. The 6-month-olds dishabituated significantly more to reversal of causal reaction events than to noncausal delay events, whereas younger infants reacted similarly to reversal of both. Thus, perceptual causality for reaction events emerges by 6 months of age, a younger age than previously reported but, crucially, the same age at which perceptual causality for launch events has emerged in prior research. On our second question, animate/inanimate motion had no effect at any age, nor did significant correlations emerge with our additional tasks assessing goal perception or goal-directed object retrieval. Available evidence, here and elsewhere, is as compatible with a view that infants initially see A affecting B, without differentiation into physical or psychological causality, as with the standard assumption of distinct physical/psychological causal perception.