Matthew E Roser | PubMed Health

PubMed2005

Brain mechanisms underlying perceptual causality.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine the neural correlates of perceptual causality. Participants were imaged while viewing alternating blocks of causal events in which a ball collides with, and causes movement of another ball, versus non-causal events in which a spatial or a temporal gap precedes the movement of a second ball. There were significantly higher levels of relative activation in the right middle frontal gyrus and the right inferior parietal lobule for causal relative to non-causal events. Furthermore, when the differential effects of spatial and temporal incontiguities were subtracted from the contiguous stimuli, we observed both common (right prefrontal) and unique (right parietal and right temporal) regions of activation as a function of spatial and temporal processing of contiguity, respectively. Taken together, these data provide a means to help determine how the visual system extracts causality from dynamic visual information in the environment using spatial and temporal cues.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Dissociating processes supporting causal perception and causal inference in the brain.

An understanding of relations between causes and effects is essential for making sense of the dynamic physical world. It has been argued that this understanding of causality depends on both perceptual and inferential components. To investigate whether causal perception and causal inference rely on common or on distinct processes, the authors tested 2 callosotomy (split-brain) patients and a group of neurologically intact participants. The authors show that the direct perception of causality and the ability to infer causality depend on different hemispheres of the divided brain. This finding implies that understanding causality is not a unitary process and that causal perception and causal inference can proceed independently.

Chi-Square Distribution↗