Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2010 Apr 6:4:28.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2010.00028. eCollection 2010.

Space and time in perceptual causality

Affiliations

Space and time in perceptual causality

Benjamin Straube et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Inferring causality is a fundamental feature of human cognition that allows us to theorize about and predict future states of the world. Michotte suggested that humans automatically perceive causality based on certain perceptual features of events. However, individual differences in judgments of perceptual causality cast doubt on Michotte's view. To gain insights in the neural basis of individual difference in the perception of causality, our participants judged causal relationships in animations of a blue ball colliding with a red ball (a launching event) while fMRI-data were acquired. Spatial continuity and temporal contiguity were varied parametrically in these stimuli. We did not find consistent brain activation differences between trials judged as caused and those judged as non-caused, making it unlikely that humans have universal instantiation of perceptual causality in the brain. However, participants were slower to respond to and showed greater neural activity for violations of causality, suggesting that humans are biased to expect causal relationships when moving objects appear to interact. Our participants demonstrated considerable individual differences in their sensitivity to spatial and temporal characteristics in perceiving causality. These qualitative differences in sensitivity to time or space in perceiving causality were instantiated in individual differences in activation of the left basal ganglia or right parietal lobe, respectively. Thus, the perception that the movement of one object causes the movement of another is triggered by elemental spatial and temporal sensitivities, which themselves are instantiated in specific distinct neural networks.

Keywords: expectation; fMRI; perception of causality; spatial continuity; temporal contiguity.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Parametric manipulation of spatial continuity and temporal contiguity. Illustrates the parametric violations of spatial continuity and temporal contiguity. All combinations of angle and time delay were presented to the subjects twice (once in which the balls moved left to right and once in which they moved right to left) in a pseudo-randomized order. For each trial the subject was instructed to press a button if they thought that the blue ball caused the red ball to move.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Causal judgments in relation to stimulus characteristics. Illustrates the probability that a particular combination of angle and time delay was judged as causal. The angle manipulation is color-coded on a scale from dark red (no angle) to light red (60°). The error bars represent the standard error of the mean.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Individual differences in causality judgments with regard to spatial and temporal violations. Illustrates the individual differences in the proportion of causality judgments separate for each subject and divided for angle and time manipulations. Each data-point represents the mean of all 14 trials presented with the corresponding angle or time delay. Each line corresponds to a single subject. S02, S04 and S15 are highlighted to illustrate the different response pattern. These subjects are also shown in Figure 6 (S04: blue, sensitive to time; S15: red, sensitive to angle; S02: green, sensitive to angle and time).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Common activations for causal and non-causal trials. Shows the group activation map for common activation (based on a conjunction null analysis, SPM) of causal and non-causal judged trials in contrast to baseline (fixation cross) independent of increasing spatial and temporal violations and the individual judgment of causality. Activation maps are presented of single subjects render brain of SPM (left and right) and on coronal, sagittal and axial slices of a template brain (middle; MRIcro). L, left; R, right; F, frontal; O, occipital.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The processing of spatial and temporal characteristics in relation to the judgments of causality. Shows the group activation map for the correlation of the processing of stimulus characteristics their individual predictive value for the judgment of causality. Activation maps for increasing angle and time delay for each subject were correlated at the group level with the predictive values of the logistic regression analyses for angle (red) and time delay (blue), respectively.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Brain activation and causality judgments of three individual participants. Illustration of three individual participants with different patterns of brain activation in response to increasing angle (red) and time delay (blue; left). These participants also show distinct response patterns in their judgments of causality (center) and corresponding predictive values of angle and delay from the logistic regression analyses (right). Participants with more activation in the basal ganglia are more likely to attend to time delays, whereas participants with more activity in the right parietal lobe were more sensitive to spatial violations (see Figure 5 for group analysis).

References

    1. Banich M. T., Milham M. P., Atchley R., Cohen N. J., Webb A., Wszalek T., Kramer A. F., Liang Z. P., Wright A., Shenker J., Magin R. (2000). fMri studies of Stroop tasks reveal unique roles of anterior and posterior brain systems in attentional selection. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 12, 988–1000 10.1162/08989290051137521 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Beasley N. A. (1968). The extent of individual differences in the perception of causality. Can. J. Psychol. 22, 399–407 10.1037/h0082779 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Billino J., Braun D. I., Böhm K.-D., Bremmer F., Gegenfurtner K. R. (2009). Cortical networks for motion processing: effects of focal brain lesions on perception of different motion types. Neuropsychologia 47, 2133–2144 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.04.005 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Blakemore S. J., Boyer P., Pachot-Clouard M., Meltzoff A., Segebarth C., Decety J. (2003). The detection of contingency and animacy from simple animations in the human brain. Cereb. Cortex 13, 837–844 10.1093/cercor/13.8.837 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Blakemore S. J., Fonlupt P., Pachot-Clouard M., Darmon C., Boyer P., Meltzoff A. N., Segebarth C., Decety J. (2001). How the brain perceives causality: an event-related fMRI study. Neuroreport 12, 3741–3746 10.1097/00001756-200112040-00027 - DOI - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources