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# Visual Adaptation of the Perception of Causality

## Details

**Authors** Rolfs et al.

**Year** 2013

**Publisher** Current Biology

**Discipline** Neuroscience

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.017) 
10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.017

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To discuss how seeing the Relationships occasionally depends on the immediacy of the cause and effect principle.

### What they found (results)

The results were that, “events that were perceptually ambiguous before adaptation were now judged to be noncausal passes in the vast majority of trials; events that were regularly perceived as causal before adaptation had now become ambiguous.” The present findings take an equally important step toward determining how the brain parses events and assigns causal links, which paves the way for tracking down the neural mechanisms underlying these visual processes.

## Commentary

### In short

Humans have the ability to “fill in the blanks” between cause and effect in the case of predicting where a ball will land once it’s been thrown in the air for example. The brain (using vision and visual cues) can then parse through events and assign a relationship or a causal path in real time.

### In more detail

Rolfs et. al. 2013 discussed how seeing the Relationships occasionally depends on the immediacy of the cause and effect principle. They stated that if there was a delay between the causal node of the Relationship and the subsequent effect, then the person could miss the Relationship entirely. “The perception of causality involves two components, one that is stimulus based and one that is inference based.” They completed three experiments, the first of which was testing the adaptation to collision events. The collision stimuli they used were two discs bouncing back and forth, clearly causal to each other. The subjects had to watch the discs and determine where the “point of subjective equality” was. One test group had the locations adapted, while the other did not. The results were that, “events that were perceptually ambiguous before adaptation were now judged to be noncausal passes in the vast majority of trials; events that were regularly perceived as causal before adaptation had now become ambiguous.” The second experiment was set up functionally the same as the first, except the stimulus was a slipping disc instead of the swinging discs. The point was to test “whether adaptation to other visual features of the adapting stimuli might explain the change in observers’ judgments of causality.” However, in this experiment, there was no change in perceptual causality. In the final experiment, they sought to determine the “reference frame of adaptation.” In order to test this they measured eye movements with one side of fixation. “The present findings take an equally important step toward determining how the brain parses events and assigns causal links, which paves the way for tracking down the neural mechanisms underlying these visual processes.” Humans have the ability to “fill in the blanks” between cause and effect in the case of predicting where a ball will land once it’s been thrown in the air for example. The brain (using vision and visual cues) can then parse through events and assign a relationship or a causal path in real time.

**Patterns it shows** R

**How to cite this** Rolfs et al. (2013). Visual Adaptation of the Perception of Causality. Current Biology.