Comparing the aftereffects of motion and causality across visual co-ordinates

Abstract

Albert Michotte (1946/1963) introduced causality into the realm of experimental phenomenology. He disputed Humes (1739/1978) claim that the impression of causality comes only from conscious inference. Since then, causality adaptation studies have suggested that the visual perception of causality undergoes sensory adaptation, akin to the retinally-specific aftereffects of motion or orientation adaptation. Here we present 5 Experiments that, together, dispute a view of retinotopically-mapped neural populations dedicated to causality detection. We first point to key issues in previous studies of causality adaptation. Then we extend the basic causality adaptation paradigm to show that causality aftereffects occur in spatially global visual space. We directly compare causality aftereffects to the motion aftereffect to show important differences in their co-ordinate mapping. Our data point to a role for cognitive inferences as being an important aspect of causality aftereffects, despite causal impressions being tightly constrained by sensory perception.