Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigated how knowledge of causality representations affects the reading in Japanese. In Experiment 1, 24 participants read events presented in cause-to-effect or effect-to-cause order without causal conjunctions. The latter received longer reading times and more regressions than the former even when probability and predictability were balanced. Experiment 2 examined whether this reading order effect was derived from a default reasoning asymmetry (i.e., reasoning from cause to effect is favored over that from effect to cause). We utilized epistemic constructions to explicitly identify the reasoning direction. Self-paced reading results from 24 participants showed that readers were more efficient when reading cause-event as the evidence, effect-event as the conclusion vis-a-vis the counterpart, confirming the reasoning asymmetry. However, reading order effect remained robust, presumably reflecting that causal reasoning is temporally embodied.