Item

Abstract

One of the most important tasks for humans is the attribution of causes and effects ---
in diverse contexts, including visual perception. Albert Michott
e was one of the first to systematically
study causal visual perception using his now well
-
known launching event paradigm.
Launching events are the collision and transfer of movement between two objects
---
featureless disks in the original experiments. The
perceptual simplicity of the original displays
allows for insight into the basics of the mechanisms governing causal perception.
We wanted
to study the relation between causal ratings for launching in the usual abstract setting and
launching collisions in
a photo
-
realistic setting. For this purpose we presented typical
launching events with differing temporal gaps, as well as the same launching processes with
photo
-
realistic billiard balls, and also photo
-
realistic billiard balls with realistic physics, i.
e. an
initial rebound of the first ball after collision and a short sliding phase of the second ball. We
found that simply giving the normal launching stimulus realistic visuals lead to lower causal
ratings, but realistic visuals together with realistic ph
ysics evoked higher ratings. We discuss
this initially perhaps counter
-
intuitive result in terms of cue conflict and the seemingly detailed
(implicit) physical knowledge embodied in our visual system.