Time and Causality: Mutual Constraints Insights from Event and Time Perception, Motor Control, an... more Time and Causality: Mutual Constraints Insights from Event and Time Perception, Motor Control, and Gaming Marc J Buehner (BuehnerM@Cardiff.ac.uk) (Organizer/Moderator) Cardiff University, School of Psychology, Tower Building, Park Place Cardiff, CF10 3AT UK David A Lagnado & Christos Bechlivanidis (d.lagnado@ucl.ac.uk, c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk) University College London, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT UK Marc O Ernst & Marieke Rohde (marc.ernst@uni-bielefeld.de, marieke.rohde@uni-bielefeld.de) Universitat Bielefeld, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Universitatsstr. 25 33615 Bielefeld Germany Michael E Young (michaelyoung@ksu.edu) Kansas State University, Department of Psychology, 492 Bluemont Hall Manhattan, Kansas 66506-5302 USA Keywords: Causality, Time, Perception, Learning, Reasoning, Binding, Event Segmentation, Sensory Integration adaptation, or forward learning models of motor control), while others adopt a broader perspectiv...
While it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonst... more While it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In causal reordering (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events, rather than the correct temporal order. Across four experiments, 4- to 10-year-old children (N=813) and adults (N=178) watched a 3-object Michotte-style ‘pseudocollision’. While the canonical version of the clip would have object A colliding with B, which would then collide with object C (order: ABC), the pseudocollision involved the same spatial array of objects but featured object C moving before object B (order: ACB), with no collision between B and C. Participants were asked to judge the temporal order of events and whether object B collided with C. Across all age groups, participants were significantly more likely to judge that B collided with C in the 3-object pseudocollision than in a 2-object cont...
Learning and Behavior a Psychonomic Society Publication, May 1, 2005
Nearly every theory of causal induction assumes that the existence and strength of causal relatio... more Nearly every theory of causal induction assumes that the existence and strength of causal relations needs to be inferred from observational data in the form of covariations. The last few decades have seen much controversy over exactly how covariations license causal conjectures. One consequence of this debate is that causal induction research has taken for granted that covariation information is readily available to reasoners. This perspective is reflected in typical experimental designs, which either employ covariation information in summary format or present participants with clearly marked discrete learning trials. I argue that such experimental designs oversimplify the problem of causal induction. Real-world contexts rarely are structured so neatly; rather, the decision about whether a cause and effect co-occurred on a given occasion constitutes a key element of the inductive process. This article will review how the event-parsing aspect of causal induction has been and could be addressed in associative learning and causal power theories.
Three experiments investigated the impact of delay on human causal learning. We present a new par... more Three experiments investigated the impact of delay on human causal learning. We present a new paradigm based on the presentation of continuous event streams, and use it to test two hypotheses drawn from associative learning theories of causal inference. Unlike free-operant procedures traditionally used to study temporal aspects of causal learning (Shanks, Pearson, & Dickinson, 1989; Shanks & Dickinson, 1987; Buehner & May, 2002, 2003, 2004), the procedure employed here allows full control over all aspects of stimulus delivery while at the same time overcoming the ecologically invalid notion of discrete learning trials. Results show that delays generally impair causal learning, but prior knowledge and experience mediate this detrimental effect. In accordance with associative learning theory, pre-exposure to an unreinforced background context facilitates the discovery of delayed causal relationships. However, contrary to associative learning theory, increasing the amount of experience...
Abstract 1. Reports an error in" Temporal predictability facilitates causal learning" b... more Abstract 1. Reports an error in" Temporal predictability facilitates causal learning" by W. James Greville and Marc J. Buehner (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2010 [Nov], Vol 139 [4], 756-771). Figure 2 (p. 759) contained an error. The corrected figure ...
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2009
Sensory-motor delays vary over the course of development and under different environmental condit... more Sensory-motor delays vary over the course of development and under different environmental conditions. Previous research has shown that humans can compensate for the resulting temporal misalignment while performing sensory-motor tasks (e.g., Cunningham, Billock, & Tsou, 2001a), but remains silent on the question of whether perceptual learning-similar to that involved in adaptation to spatial misalignment (e.g., Redding & Wallace, 1993) and in adaptation to purely intersensory misalignment (e.g., Fujisaki, Shimojo, Kashino, & Nishida, 2004)-is also involved in this adaptive response. Following an attempted replication of Cunningham et al.'s (2001a) study in a preliminary experiment, we present in this paper two experiments that demonstrate that after-effects of adaptation to temporal misalignment do not spontaneously decay. The literature on adaptation to spatial misalignment suggests that, while instrumental learning spontaneously decays in the absence of reinforcement, perceptual learning persists. Therefore our results are consistent with adaptation being effected through perceptual learning.
Time and Causality: Mutual Constraints Insights from Event and Time Perception, Motor Control, an... more Time and Causality: Mutual Constraints Insights from Event and Time Perception, Motor Control, and Gaming Marc J Buehner (BuehnerM@Cardiff.ac.uk) (Organizer/Moderator) Cardiff University, School of Psychology, Tower Building, Park Place Cardiff, CF10 3AT UK David A Lagnado & Christos Bechlivanidis (d.lagnado@ucl.ac.uk, c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk) University College London, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT UK Marc O Ernst & Marieke Rohde (marc.ernst@uni-bielefeld.de, marieke.rohde@uni-bielefeld.de) Universitat Bielefeld, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Universitatsstr. 25 33615 Bielefeld Germany Michael E Young (michaelyoung@ksu.edu) Kansas State University, Department of Psychology, 492 Bluemont Hall Manhattan, Kansas 66506-5302 USA Keywords: Causality, Time, Perception, Learning, Reasoning, Binding, Event Segmentation, Sensory Integration adaptation, or forward learning models of motor control), while others adopt a broader perspectiv...
While it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonst... more While it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In causal reordering (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events, rather than the correct temporal order. Across four experiments, 4- to 10-year-old children (N=813) and adults (N=178) watched a 3-object Michotte-style ‘pseudocollision’. While the canonical version of the clip would have object A colliding with B, which would then collide with object C (order: ABC), the pseudocollision involved the same spatial array of objects but featured object C moving before object B (order: ACB), with no collision between B and C. Participants were asked to judge the temporal order of events and whether object B collided with C. Across all age groups, participants were significantly more likely to judge that B collided with C in the 3-object pseudocollision than in a 2-object cont...
Learning and Behavior a Psychonomic Society Publication, May 1, 2005
Nearly every theory of causal induction assumes that the existence and strength of causal relatio... more Nearly every theory of causal induction assumes that the existence and strength of causal relations needs to be inferred from observational data in the form of covariations. The last few decades have seen much controversy over exactly how covariations license causal conjectures. One consequence of this debate is that causal induction research has taken for granted that covariation information is readily available to reasoners. This perspective is reflected in typical experimental designs, which either employ covariation information in summary format or present participants with clearly marked discrete learning trials. I argue that such experimental designs oversimplify the problem of causal induction. Real-world contexts rarely are structured so neatly; rather, the decision about whether a cause and effect co-occurred on a given occasion constitutes a key element of the inductive process. This article will review how the event-parsing aspect of causal induction has been and could be addressed in associative learning and causal power theories.
Three experiments investigated the impact of delay on human causal learning. We present a new par... more Three experiments investigated the impact of delay on human causal learning. We present a new paradigm based on the presentation of continuous event streams, and use it to test two hypotheses drawn from associative learning theories of causal inference. Unlike free-operant procedures traditionally used to study temporal aspects of causal learning (Shanks, Pearson, & Dickinson, 1989; Shanks & Dickinson, 1987; Buehner & May, 2002, 2003, 2004), the procedure employed here allows full control over all aspects of stimulus delivery while at the same time overcoming the ecologically invalid notion of discrete learning trials. Results show that delays generally impair causal learning, but prior knowledge and experience mediate this detrimental effect. In accordance with associative learning theory, pre-exposure to an unreinforced background context facilitates the discovery of delayed causal relationships. However, contrary to associative learning theory, increasing the amount of experience...
Abstract 1. Reports an error in" Temporal predictability facilitates causal learning" b... more Abstract 1. Reports an error in" Temporal predictability facilitates causal learning" by W. James Greville and Marc J. Buehner (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2010 [Nov], Vol 139 [4], 756-771). Figure 2 (p. 759) contained an error. The corrected figure ...
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2009
Sensory-motor delays vary over the course of development and under different environmental condit... more Sensory-motor delays vary over the course of development and under different environmental conditions. Previous research has shown that humans can compensate for the resulting temporal misalignment while performing sensory-motor tasks (e.g., Cunningham, Billock, & Tsou, 2001a), but remains silent on the question of whether perceptual learning-similar to that involved in adaptation to spatial misalignment (e.g., Redding & Wallace, 1993) and in adaptation to purely intersensory misalignment (e.g., Fujisaki, Shimojo, Kashino, & Nishida, 2004)-is also involved in this adaptive response. Following an attempted replication of Cunningham et al.'s (2001a) study in a preliminary experiment, we present in this paper two experiments that demonstrate that after-effects of adaptation to temporal misalignment do not spontaneously decay. The literature on adaptation to spatial misalignment suggests that, while instrumental learning spontaneously decays in the absence of reinforcement, perceptual learning persists. Therefore our results are consistent with adaptation being effected through perceptual learning.
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