Citation

Bechlivanidis C, Lagnado DA. Psychol. Sci. 2013; 24(8): 1563-1572.

Affiliation

University College London.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797613476046

PMID

23804958

Abstract

Traditional approaches to human causal reasoning assume that the perception of temporal order informs judgments of causal structure. In this article, we present two experiments in which people followed the opposite inferential route: Perceptual judgments of temporal order were instead influenced by causal beliefs. By letting participants freely interact with a software-based "physics world," we induced stable causal beliefs that subsequently determined participants' reported temporal order of events, even when this led to a reversal of the objective temporal order. We argue that for short timescales, even when temporal-resolution capabilities suffice, the perception of temporal order is distorted to fit existing causal beliefs.

Language: en