Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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