ABSTRACT

When two motions appear to be causally related, the spatiotemporal features of motions are sometimes distorted in order to increase the consistency with causal impressions. Here, in four experiments, we tested if varying the speed of an object A could affect the judged speed of an object B that appeared to be causally related to A. Participants were presented with classic launching stimuli (Experiment 1), a variant of launching stimuli in which A could move with uniformly accelerated or decelerated motion (Experiment 2), non-launching stimuli that elicited a causal impression (Experiment 3), and stimuli showing a three-object launching event (Experiment 4). Main results showed that the judged speed of B was systematically biased towards the speed of A, and moreover that the judged speed of B depended on the average speed of A, rather than on the speed of A at the moment of collision as it would be predicted by Newtonian mechanics. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that internal representations of causal events based on property transmission (for instance, impetus) can affect judgments of the low-level properties of causal scenarios.

摘要

当两个动作看起来因果相关时，动作的时空特征有时会失真，以增加与因果印象的一致性。在这里，在四个实验中，我们测试了改变物体A的速度是否会影响似乎与A因果相关的物体B的判断速度。向参与者展示了经典的发射刺激（实验1），发射刺激的一种变体，其中A可以以均匀的加速或减速运动运动（实验2），非发射刺激引起因果感（实验3），并且刺激显示三目标发射事件（实验4）。主要结果表明，B的判断速度是系统地偏向A的速度，而且B的判断速度取决于A的平均速度，而不是牛顿力学预测的碰撞时A的速度。结果与以下假设一致：基于属性传递（例如，推动力）的因果事件的内部表示会影响因果情境的低级属性的判断。