Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism

Meding, Kristof; Bruijns, Sebastian A.; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Berens, Philipp; Wichmann, Felix A.

doi:10.1177/2041669520927038

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…To make an illustrative example, since Michotte’s (1946/1963) seminal study on the perception of causality, the intuitive physics of collisions has been mainly studied using simple animations involving immaterial shapes moving in one or two dimensions (e.g., Gerstenberg et al, 2012; Lau & Brady, 2020; Runeson & Vedeler, 1993; Sanborn et al, 2013; Smith & Vul, 2013; Vicovaro et al, 2020; White, 2007). Only few studies have attempted to increase the realism of simulated collisions, for instance by using 3D spheres made of definite simulated materials (Vicovaro, 2018; Vicovaro & Burigana, 2016) or by mimicking the effects of friction and rotation on the collision behavior of the stimuli (Meding et al, 2020; Reitsma & O’Sullivan, 2009). The results of these studies suggest that the realism of the stimuli has a substantial influence on subjective judgments of the naturalness of collisions.…”

Section: The Heuristic Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence of weight-based representations of gravitational motion.

Vicovaro¹,

Noventa

Ghiani³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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A hypothesis gaining increasing popularity is that laypeople’s representations of physical phenomena might be driven by internalized physical laws. In three experiments, we tested if such hypothesis holds true for the representation of gravitational motion. Participants were presented with realistic, real-scale virtual spheres falling vertically downward from about 2 m high. The spheres appeared to be made of either polystyrene or wood. In Experiment 1, participants adjusted the falling motion pattern until it appeared to be natural. In Experiment 2, they compared the perceived naturalness of vertical free falls in a vacuum with the perceived naturalness of more realistic falls characterized by the presence of air drag. In Experiment 3, they estimated the position of the sphere after a variable interval of time from the beginning of the fall. Inconsistently with predictions from physics, results showed that representations of gravitational motion were strongly affected by the implied masses of the falling objects and did not account for air drag. This provides support for the hypothesis of weight-based heuristic representations of gravitational motion against the hypothesis of the internalization of physical laws.

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Section: The Heuristic Perspectivementioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence of weight-based representations of gravitational motion.

Vicovaro¹,

Noventa

Ghiani³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Previous studies on material perception have shown that image speed and/or playback speed of video clips were strong determinants of apparent heaviness and stiffness (Shim et al, 2009;Kawabe et al, 2015;Kawabe and Nishida, 2016;Bi et al, 2018). In visual stimuli inducing perceptual causality (Michotte, 1963;Scholl and Tremoulet, 2000;Meding et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020), movement speeds after object collision determine the perceived heaviness of the object (Todd and Warren, 1982). A previous study (Kawabe et al, 2021) showed that a lower speed of a cursor controlled by a participant's keystroke caused a stronger sense of resistance, while the resistance sensation produced by visual processing is not necessarily linked to the participant's action.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Delay and Speed of Visual Feedback of a Keystroke Cause Illusory Heaviness and Stiffness

Yokosaka

Kawabe

2022

Front. Neurosci.

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Imposing a delay between an action (e.g., a limb movement) and its related visual feedback (e.g., a cursor movement on the display) induces a peculiar sensation of heaviness or stiffness. Earlier studies have examined this delay-induced heaviness or stiffness sensation in relation to the non-arbitrary causal relationship between an action and its effect. Here, “non-arbitrary causal relationship” means that an action produces a specific and deterministic pattern of visual feedback; for example, a leftward limb movement consistently and deterministically causes a leftward visual motion. In modern graphical user interfaces, on the other hand, users often control visual information by pressing keys, wherein the relationship between the keystroke and the change in visual information is arbitrary. The present study examined whether the sensation of heaviness, stiffness and bumpiness could be caused when participants' keystroke produced a delayed arbitrary visual feedback. Participants were asked to press and hold down an assigned key to cause temporal luminance changes in a square centered on the display, an arbitrary visual feedback of their keystroke. Not only the onset delay of the temporal luminance change from the participant's keystroke but also the speed of the temporal luminance change were examined as a visual cue to heaviness, stiffness, or bumpiness. In Experiment 1, the participants' task was to give a rating for the strength of the heaviness, stiffness, or bumpiness perceived when they pressed the key. Our results showed that the heaviness and stiffness ratings increased as the delay increased and decreased as the speed increased. To check whether the manipulation of the delay and speed of the visual feedback caused changes in the subjective evaluation of sensorimotor incongruence, in Experiment 2, we asked the participants to give a rating for the sense of agency. The rating scores decreased as the delay increased and increased as the speed increased. The delay and speed influenced the rating scores for the sense of agency in the opposite direction to those for heaviness/stiffness. We discuss that the brain determines the heaviness and stiffness during a keystroke based on internalized statistics relating to the delay and speed of the action feedback.

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Sonic Sleight of Hand: Sound Induces Illusory Distortions in the Perception and Prediction of Robot Action

Currie,

Giannaccini,

Bach

2024

Int J of Soc Robotics

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For efficient human–robot interaction, human operators need to be able to efficiently represent the robot’s movements in space and predict its next steps. However, according to frameworks of Bayesian multisensory integration, features outside the motion itself—like the sounds a robot makes while it moves—should affect how otherwise identical motions are perceived. Here, we translate an established psychophysical task from experimental psychology to a human–robot interaction context, which can measure these distortions to motion perception. In two series of preregistered studies, participants watched a humanoid robot make forward and backward reaching movements. When the robot hand suddenly disappeared, they reported its last seen location, either with the mouse cursor (Experiment 1a and 1b) or by matching it to probe stimuli in different locations (Experiment 2a and 2b). The results revealed that even small changes to the robot’s sound robustly affect participants’ visuospatial representation of its motions, so that the motion appeared to extend further in space when accompanied by slightly (100 ms) longer sounds compared to slightly shorter sounds (100 ms shorter). Moreover, these sound changes do not only affect where people currently locate the robot’s motion, but where they anticipate its future steps. These findings show that sound design is an effective medium for manipulating how people represent otherwise identical robot actions and coordinate its interactions with it. The study acts as proof of concept that psychophysical tasks provide a promising tool to measure how design parameters influence the perception and prediction of robot motion.

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Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism

Cited by 6 publications

References 49 publications

Evidence of weight-based representations of gravitational motion.

Evidence of weight-based representations of gravitational motion.

Delay and Speed of Visual Feedback of a Keystroke Cause Illusory Heaviness and Stiffness

Sonic Sleight of Hand: Sound Induces Illusory Distortions in the Perception and Prediction of Robot Action

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