The Role Of Social Cues In Constructing The Causal Perception Of Physical Events

Besides the basic physical properties such as color, shape and motion, we can also directly perceive the causal interactions between physical objects. This ability is critical for us to understand the structure of the outside world and therefore interact with it effectively. The major problem in perceiving causality is that the information in the environment is insufficient to deductively infer the causal structure of events. Thus, abundant research has been dedicated to exploring what environmental cues are used to determine whether the mechanical events will be interpreted as causal. Since the key issue of this line of research is the perception of physical events, almost all the previous studies have focused on the physical cues (especially spatiotemporal features of the display). I suggest that cues of a completely different domain-the social cues-also impact the causal perception of physical events. It is because that we live in a society where physical events can be simultaneously viewed by others, and their responses convey information about how they perceive those events. These social cues can help the visual system overcome the lack of information in constructing causal perception of physical events.To test this hypothesis, I presented expression changes as social cues in the Michotte’s collision display, and investigated the causal perception with both subjective reports and implicit measurements. The results showed that:(1) the causally ambiguous events are more likely to be perceived as causal if the faces super-imposed on the objects change from neutral to fearful.(2) the social cue effect occurs automatically and irresistibly.(3) the visual system integrates social cues in a surprisingly flexible and intelligent way, only reasonable cues can be used, and the social cues are integrated as predictive cues.(4) the social cues impact the perception process rather than the decision process as the impact also appears in the causality-induced illusion.(5) female is more sensitive to social cues when constructing the causal perception of physical events. These findings suggest that the visual system does not depend merely on the physical information, but also on the social information gathering from other observers to construct our own perception of the physical world. It implies that the processing of social and physical information starts to interact during automatic visual perception.