Sensitivity to Newtonian mechanical regularities in causal perception: Evidence from attention

Causal perception is constrained by principles of Newtonian mechanics

Humans irresistibly perceive certain events as causal. We show, for the first time, that there is not one monolithic representation of causality in perception. Rather, there are multiple categories of causal events in perception, one of which is constrained by an approximation of a Newtonian mechanical principle: in an elastic collision, a struck object cannot move at more than double the speed...

Prism adaptation influences perception but not attention: evidence from antisaccades.

Prism adaptation has been shown to successfully alleviate symptoms of hemispatial neglect, yet the underlying mechanism is still poorly understood. In this study, the antisaccade task was used to measure the effects of prism adaptation on spatial attention in healthy participants. Results indicated that prism adaptation did not influence the saccade latencies or antisaccade errors, both strong ...

Sensitivity to Confounding in Causal Inference: From Childhood to Adulthood

A necessary condition for correctly assessing causality is the absence of confounding causes. This paper reports a pair of experiments that investigate whether people are sensitive to confounding when they infer causation. Two stories were constructed, one in which two candidate causes perfectly covaried with each other (confounded), and another in which the two candidate causes occurred indepe...

Sensitivity to sequential regularities in risky decision making

Sensitivity to Complex Statistical Regularities in Rat Auditory Cortex

Neurons in auditory cortex are sensitive to the probability of stimuli: responses to rare stimuli tend to be stronger than responses to common ones. Here, intra- and extracellular recordings from the auditory cortex of halothane-anesthetized rats revealed the existence of a finer sensitivity to the structure of sound sequences. Using oddball sequences in which the order of stimulus presentation...