Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We observe causal relationships naturally and quickly in events that we experience in our life. The current research investigates if causal events like collisions attract our attention to other changes in objects involved in the causal event. Participants reported colour changes in two objects, one involved in a causal event (collision) and the other independent. Aligning with our expectation, we observed that participants are more likely to report the colour change involved in the causal event when it happened at the same time as the collision. Against our prediction however, we observed a similar effect when colour changes happened before the collision, while the difference was less strong when the colour changes happened after the collision. One possible explanation is that the effect stems from participants anticipating causal events, leading them to pay extra attention to objects potentially involved in collisions. This focused attention makes participants more likely to notice colour changes during the anticipation period, which means people are actively devoting more cognitive resources anticipating and confirming causal interactions. This finding suggests that people prioritise causal observations in visual search tasks.