Perceiving Causality after the Fact: Postdiction in the Temporal Dynamics of Causal Perception

In simple dynamic events we can easily perceive not only motion, but also higher-level properties such as causality, as when we see one object collide with another. Several researchers have suggested that such causal perception is an automatic and stimulus-driven process, sensitive only to particular sorts of visual information, and a major research project has been to uncover the nature of these visual cues. Here, rather than investigating what information affects causal perception, we instead explore the temporal dynamics of when certain types of information are used. Surprisingly, we find that certain visual events can determine whether we perceive a collision in an ambiguous situation even when those events occur after the moment of potential ‘impact’ in the putative collision has already passed. This illustrates a type of postdictive perception: our conscious perception of the world is not an instantaneous moment-by-moment construction, but rather is formed by integrating information presented within short temporal windows, so that new information which is obtained can influence the immediate past in our conscious awareness. Such effects have been previously demonstrated for low-level motion phenomena, but the present results demonstrate that postdictive processes can influence higher-level event perception. These findings help to characterize not only the ‘rules’ of causal perception, but also the temporal dynamics of how and when those rules operate.