Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human understanding of causation may be grounded in our experience of physical forces in the world. We investi-gated whether right-handers, who exert greater force with their right than left hands, judge candidate causes on the right sideas more causal. In two experiments, subjects simultaneously learned about a moderately effective and an ineffective causeon a trial-by-trial basis. Subjects rated the moderately effective cause as more causal when it appeared on the right side ofspace. This effect was also present in subjects’ trial-by-trial predictions, but the effect reversed with a left-right reversal in thespatial-numeric mapping of the causal judgment scale. The results are not consistent with the notion that our understanding ofcausation is grounded in our ability to exert force. However, they are consistent with influences of motor fluency and polaritycorrespondence on judgment.