Visual Impressions of Causality
Peter Anthony White · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2017
A simple animation in which a moving object contacts a stationary one and the latter then moves off gives rise to a visual impression in which the first object makes the second one move. There are several other kinds of visual causal impressions; they are perceptual interpretations that go beyond, and disambiguate, the information in the stimulus. It has been argued that visual causal impressions result from the activation of innate perceptual structures or mechanisms. It has also been argued that visual causal impressions result from the activation of memorial information based on past experience. These past experiences may be of actions on objects or of other things acting on a passive actor. Whichever of these hypotheses turns out to be correct, the visual world as experienced is already interpreted in terms of causality before causal reasoning processes begin to operate.