Spatio-temporal effects on the perception of causality

The human visual system is exquisitely sensitive to dynamics. Causality is a key concept for human thought and action: The world around us appears as a coherent flow of events, each event caused by others which are in turn caused by other events, and so on. Albert Michotte (1963) showed that humans perceive causality directly or indirectly as a low-level perceptual event. As a result, the impression of purposeful, intentional relations are ßurprisingly easy" to obtain. Despite traditional claims to the contrary, observers are reasonably sensitive to physical and social causality in the real world, at least if they have relevant knowledge of causal structures in schematic motion events. In this thesis the influence of physical factors on `action radius', up to the extent that the motion of the second object is seen to be caused by the first object is measured. Physical factors such as the speed of the passive object, the juxtaposition of collision in the context of variations in the arrival of Object A and departure of Object B (from some point in space) and the effects of negative delays (Object B departure is prior to Object A motion termination) were explored. Resulted that perceived causality is shown to be a function, not only of automatic processing but also constitutes a perception-action heuristic which is shown to be strategic in operation and at the same time exquisitely sensitive to the temporal structure of external events.