Human vision reconstructs time to satisfy causal constraints

The goal of perception is to infer the most plausible source of sensory stimulation. Unisensory perception of temporal order, however, appears to require no inference, since the order of events can be uniquely determined from the order in which sensory signals arrive. Here we demonstrate a novel perceptual illusion that casts doubt on this intuition: in three studies (N=607) the experienced event timings are determined by causality in real-time. Adult observers viewed a simple three-item sequence ACB, which is typically remembered as ABC (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2016), in line with principles of causality. When asked to indicate the time at which events B and C occurred, points of subjective simultaneity shifted so that the assumed cause B appeared earlier and the assumed effect C later, despite full attention and repeated viewings. This first demonstration of causality reversing perceived temporal order cannot be explained by post-perceptual distortion, lapsed attention, or saccades

Evaluating everyday explanations

People frequently rely on explanations provided by others to understand complex phenomena. A fair amount of attention has been devoted to the study of scientific explanation, and less on understanding how people evaluate naturalistic, everyday explanations. Using a corpus of diverse explanations from Reddit's "Explain Like I'm Five" and other online sources, we assessed how well a variety of explanatory criteria predict judgments of explanation quality. We find that while some criteria previously identified as explanatory virtues do predict explanation quality in naturalistic settings, other criteria, such as simplicity, do not. Notably, we find that people have a preference for complex explanations that invoke more causal mechanisms to explain an effect. We propose that this preference for complexity is driven by a desire to identify enough causes to make the effect seem inevitable

Expectation of temporal delays shapes Judgement of Causal Strength and Causal Structure

In order to accurately assess the causal relationship between variables, organisms utilise the length of temporal delays between events as a major source of information. Associative learning theories predict that judgements of causal strength uniformly decrease as temporal delays increase. Contrasting inferential learning theories, associative theories discount the influence of prior knowledge of existing causal mechanisms. In a total of two experiments, the present study demonstrates empirical evidence for inferential theories, that i) if prior knowledge suggests a long delay between cause and effect, reasoners regard variables long apart in time as equally causal as contiguous pairs ii) reasoners explain low causal strength by “re-attributing” the true cause to an alternative latent cause, altering the possible causal structure. Together, the study provides novel evidence for how people reason from temporal information towards causality

The Constructed Perception of Time

The aim of the project is the empirical investigation of the perception of temporal orde

The Attraction of Anticipation: How Causal Interactions Draw People’s Attention in Visual Tasks

We observe causal relationships naturally and quickly in events that we experience in our life. The current research investigates if causal events like collisions attract our attention to other changes in objects involved in the causal event. Participants reported colour changes in two objects, one involved in a causal event (collision) and the other independent. Aligning with our expectation, we observed that participants are more likely to report the colour change involved in the causal event when it happened at the same time as the collision. Against our prediction however, we observed a similar effect when colour changes happened before the collision, while the difference was less strong when the colour changes happened after the collision. One possible explanation is that the effect stems from participants anticipating causal events, leading them to pay extra attention to objects potentially involved in collisions. This focused attention makes participants more likely to notice colour changes during the anticipation period, which means people are actively devoting more cognitive resources anticipating and confirming causal interactions. This finding suggests that people prioritise causal observations in visual search tasks

Are Humans Intuitive Philosophers?

What are the criteria that people use to evaluate everyday explanations? We focus on simplicity, coherence, and unification. We consider various operationalizations of each construct within the context of explanations to measure how people respond to them. With regard to simplicity, some of the psychological literature suggests that people do have a preference for simple explanations that have few causes, but we find that a more complete assessment shows that this preference is moderated by a number of factors when evaluating everyday explanations. For one, people prefer explanations that elaborate on causal mechanisms and provide a greater sense of understanding, even if this increases complexity. Measures of coherence are highly predictive of explanation quality. Moreover, people prefer explanations that cohere with the evidence. But the meaning of coherence remains mysterious; it seems to be a placeholder for a complex system of evaluation. There is surprisingly little evidence that people value unification in the form of abstract explanation. Indeed, people often respond positively to extraneous detail. Detail may enhance our understanding of particular events and might help us better visualize mechanisms. We also find that people prefer explanations that use words entrenched in a community even if the explanation offers no real information. We conclude that people are not merely intuitive philosophers. How a person evaluates an explanation depends on what that person is trying to achieve

Empty sella and Friendriech's ataxia in a girl: an uncommon association

An 8-year-old girl was found to have osteopenia on x-ray examination performed because of her walking disorder. The physical and especially neurological examination were normal while the laboratory investigation for osteopenia showed abnormal low values compatible with thyroid and growth hormone deficiencies as well as prepubertal levels for gonadotropins. Further investigation revealed high prolactin levels and the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scan of the pituitary gland showed a partially empty sella. She was treated with a hormonal substitution therapy and was on follow up every three months. Two years later, her clinical status deteriorated and she presented signs compatible with ataxia Friedreich which was confirmed by DNA analysis. This is an uncommon case of a girl having partially empty sella accompanied by multihormonal disorders who eventually manifested ataxia Friedreich