Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2012 Dec;38(6):1465-75. doi: 10.1037/a0027976. Epub 2012 Apr 16.
In simple mechanical events, we can directly perceive causal interactions of the physical objects. Physical cues (especially spatiotemporal features of the display) are found to associate with causal perception. Here, we demonstrate that cues of a completely different domain--social cues--also impact the causal perception of physical events: The causally ambiguous events are more likely to be perceived as causal if the faces superimposed on the objects change from neutral to fearful. This effect has the following major properties: (a) The effect is caused by social information because it disappears when the faces are inverted or when the expression changes are unreasonable; (b) the social cues are integrated in a temporal window different from physical cues; and (c) the social cues impact the perception process rather than the decision process as the impact also appears in the causality-induced illusion. These findings suggest that the visual system relies on social information to infer the causal structure of the physical world.
在简单的机械事件中，我们可以直接感知物理对象之间的因果相互作用。已发现物理线索（尤其是显示的时空特征）与因果感知相关联。在这里，我们证明了完全不同领域的线索——社会线索——也会影响对物理事件的因果感知：如果叠加在物体上的面部从中性变为恐惧，那么因果关系模棱两可的事件更有可能被感知为因果关系。这种效应具有以下主要特性：(a) 该效应是由社会信息引起的，因为当面部被倒置或表情变化不合理时，该效应会消失；(b) 社会线索整合在与物理线索不同的时间窗口中；(c) 社会线索影响感知过程而不是决策过程，因为这种影响也出现在因果关系引起的错觉中。这些发现表明，视觉系统依赖于社会信息来推断物理世界的因果结构。
