Time and Causality: Mutual Constraints; Insights from Event and Time Perception, Motor Control, and Gaming

Time and Causality: Mutual Constraints Insights from Event and Time Perception, Motor Control, and Gaming Marc J Buehner (BuehnerM@Cardiff.ac.uk) (Organizer/Moderator) Cardiff University, School of Psychology, Tower Building, Park Place Cardiff, CF10 3AT UK David A Lagnado & Christos Bechlivanidis (d.lagnado@ucl.ac.uk, c.bechlivanidis@ucl.ac.uk) University College London, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT UK Marc O Ernst & Marieke Rohde (marc.ernst@uni-bielefeld.de, marieke.rohde@uni-bielefeld.de) Universitat Bielefeld, Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Universitatsstr. 25 33615 Bielefeld Germany Michael E Young (michaelyoung@ksu.edu) Kansas State University, Department of Psychology, 492 Bluemont Hall Manhattan, Kansas 66506-5302 USA Keywords: Causality, Time, Perception, Learning, Reasoning, Binding, Event Segmentation, Sensory Integration adaptation, or forward learning models of motor control), while others adopt a broader perspective in line with models of Bayesian Evidence Integration (e.g. Buehner, 2012). Causal beliefs influence not only time perception, but also judgments of temporal order, event segmentation, and phenomena related to multi-sensory integration. This symposium brings together researchers from various disciplines and backgrounds who all explore the interrelations between time, causality and perception, and do so applying learning theory, Bayesian approaches, physiological considerations, and high-level theories of cognition. General Background The problem of how humans and other intelligent systems construct causal representations from non-causal perceptual evidence has occupied scholars in cognitive science since many decades. Most contemporary approaches agree with David Hume that patterns of covariation between two events of interest are the critical input to the causal induction engine, irrespective of whether this induction is believed to be grounded in the formation of associations (Shanks & Dickinson, 1987), rule-based evaluation (White, 2003), appraisal of causal powers (Cheng, 1997), or construction of Bayesian Causal Networks (Pearl, 2000). Recent research, however, has repeatedly demonstrated that an exclusive focus on covariation while neglecting contiguity (another of Hume’s cues) results in ecologically invalid models of causal inference. Temporal spacing, order, variability, predictability, and patterning all have profound influence on the type of causal representation that is constructed (Greville & Buehner, 2010; Young & Cole, 2012). The influence of time upon causal representations could be seen as a bottom-up constraint (though current bottom-up models cannot account for the full spectrum of effects). However, causal representations in turn also constrain the perception of time: Put simply, two causally related events appear closer in subjective time than two (equidistant) unrelated events. This reversal of Hume’s conjecture, referred to as Causal Binding (Buehner, 2012) is a top-down constraint, and suggests that our representations of time and causality are mutually influencing one another. At present, the theoretical implications of this phenomenon are not yet fully understood. Some accounts (e.g. Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002) link it exclusively to human motor planning (appealing to mechanisms of cross-modal temporal Participant Abstracts Temporal Binding: Causality, Intentionality, or Both? (Buehner) Since the first demonstration of temporal binding between actions and their consequences (Haggard et al., 2002) more than ten years ago, various theories have been put forward to account for it, ranging from modifications of an internal clock to sensory-specific re-adaptation. The common denominator across all demonstrations of the effect appears to be causality: binding in time and space occurs when there is a causal relation linking an action and its effect. I will discuss evidence of temporal binding in the complete absence of motor action. These results are at variance with theories based on sensuo-motor realignment and thus rule out intentionality as the basis for the effect. Instead, they can be accommodated by a Bayesian Framework of event perception. Intentionality could be included in this framework as an additional predictor.