Causal perception' describes the phenomenon wherein certain interactions between objects are automatically and irresistibly experienced as involving cause and effect. Previous work using retinotopically-specific visual adaptation paradigms has provided evidence that there is at least one specific causal event, 'launching', which is identified sufficiently early in visual processing that the visual system still operates using the surface of the retina as its frame of reference. Here, we demonstrate that there are in fact multiple 'causal perceptions', such that the visual system also detects a category of event described as 'entraining'. Using a novel ambiguous 'launch/push' display, we find that adapting to launching events leads to more ‘pushing' reports, while adapting to entraining events leads to more 'launching' reports, and that these adaptation effects only occur for test events presented to the same location on the retina as the adaptation stream (i.e., are retinotopically specific). We discuss the implications of this finding for future work on causal perception and cognition.

If an object A moves until it is adjacent with a stationary objectB, at which point object A stops and object B begins moving,adults and infants 6 months of age and older perceive that Acaused B to move. These “launching” events correspond toreal-world collisions, which are governed by Newtonianmechanics. Previous work showed that infants were sensitiveto Newtonian constraints on relative speed. Here, we show thatinfant causal perception is sensitive to other physicalconstraints on collision events as well. Infants habituated to alaunching event will dishabituate to an event in which object Bmoves at a 90° angle relative to object A, but not to a rotatedversion of the launching event. This selective dishabituationwas not found for non-causal events. The results suggest thatearly-developing causal perception is sensitive to the manyphysical principles of real-world collision events

Certain events are irresistibly perceived as involving cause and effect. The prototypical exampleis the 'launching' effect, wherein one object (A) moves toward a stationary second object (B)until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the same direction. Butthere are up to a dozen different events that have been studied under the umbrella of 'causalperception'. However, these events have typically been distinguished only using explicit self-report methods, and little work has explored whether these different event labels actually capturenatural "joints" in visual processing. Here, we use the psychophysical phenomenon ofretinotopically specific visual adaptation to demonstrate that launching events and 'triggering'events (in which B moves much faster than A) involve the same underlying form of 'causality' invisual processing, but launching events and 'entraining' events (in which A and B move togetherfollowing A's arrival) do not

“Episodes” in memory are formed by the experience of dynamic events that unfold over time. However, just because a series of events unfolds sequentially does not mean that its constituents are related. Sequences can have a high degree of causal coherence, each event connecting to the next through a cause-and-effect relationship, or be a fragmented series of unrelated occurrences. Are causally coherent events remembered better? We used dynamic stimuli showing unfamiliar events to test the effect of causal structure on episodic recall in a cued memory task. Experiment 1 found that the order of causally coherent sequences of events is better remembered than that of fragmented events. Experiment 2 showed that recall of causally relevant details of coherent stimuli is superior to recall of details in fragmented sequences. These findings demonstrate that the episodic memory system is sensitive to the causal structure of events and suggest coherence usually improves recall.

Work on the origin of causal thought has always proposed that there is one ”original” causal representation, and overdevelopment this causal representation is applied to understanding different events. We propose that there are in factmultiple independent causal primitives, which must be integrated at some later point in development. In three experiments,we provide the first evidence that infants have multiple ways of representing cause and effect, that are fully dissociatedfrom each other in the first year of life. At 10 months, infants represent ”launching” events (Newtonian elastic collisions)as causal, in that they track which of two arbitrary objects is causing the other to move. They make inferences aboutwhether objects have an internal source of motion based on entraining events (in which A collides with B and remains incontact with it as they moves together). Critically, each representation lacks the signatures of the other.

Previous work has found that when adults are asked for "the first thing that comes to mind", they will provide something that falls between the descriptive average and the prescriptive ideal. In two experiments, we tested whether children would also be influenced by prescriptive information in their first-to-mind judgments, but also when they were asked to predict a randomly sampled item. In Experiment 1, providing information about whether being longer or shorter made a fictional tool better or worse led children to provide judgments that were biased toward the prescriptively 'best' tool, regardless of what they were asked for, while adults ignored prescriptive information when asked for a random sample. Experiment 2 replicated this result but further showed that the effect was specifically driven by information about which objects were prescriptively good, and did not also arise when the only salient information was about which objects were prescriptively bad.

When laypeople decide if a costly intervention is an overreaction or an appropriate response, they likely base those judgments on mental simulation about what could happen, or what would have happened without an intervention. To narrow down from the infinite set of possibilities they could consider, they may engage in a process of sampling. We examine whether judgments of overreaction can be explained by a utility- weighted sampling account from the JDM literature, or a norm- weighted sampling account from the causal judgment literature, both, or neither. Three experiments test whether these judgments are overly influenced by low-risk bad outcomes (utility-weighted sampling), or by what is likely and prescriptively good (norm-weighted sampling). Overall, participants’ judgments indicate that they disregard low-risk bad outcomes, and even when a high-risk outcome is successfully avoided, the intervention is an overreaction. These results favor a norm-weighted sampling account in the specific case of evaluating overreactions.

Norm violations have been shown to influence causal judgments. Icard, Kominsky, and Knobe (2017) explained theinfluence of norms by appeal to a model of norm-weighted sampling of counterfactual possibilities. This model explainstwo well-known effects (among others): When two agents must act to bring about an outcome (i.e. both actions arenecessary), if an agent S violates a norm, they are judged more causal than when they do not violate a norm (abnormalinflation), and the other agent B is judged to be less causal than when S does not violate a norm (causal supersession).In the present study (N = 1008), we find empirical support for two untested further predictions of this sampling modelof causal strength judgments: Abnormal inflation of S is greater when B violates a norm (inflation increase), and causalsupersession of B is smaller when S violates a norm (supersession decrease).

For cases in which precise information is practically or actually unknowable, certainty and precision can indicate a lack of competence, while expressions of ignorance may indicate greater expertise. In two experiments, we investigated whether children and adults are able to use this “virtuous ignorance” as a cue to expertise. Experiment 1 found that adults and children older than 9 years selected confident informants for knowable information and ignorant informants for unknowable information. However, 5-7-yearolds overwhelmingly favored a confident informant, even when such precision was completely implausible. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that 5-8-year-olds and adults are both able to distinguish between knowable and unknowable items when asked how difficult the information would be to acquire, but those same children still failed to reject the precise and confident informant for unknowable items. We suggest that children have difficulty integrating information about the knowability of particular facts into their evaluations of expertise