Abstract
Collision events, in which a moving object abruptly stops and an adjacent object immediately takes off in the same direction, cause a striking phenomenal experience of causality. To this day the jury is still out on whether this experience is the result of vision (achieved by perception) or cognition (achieved by reason). To address this, we used visual adaptation to reveal the contribution and undeniably visual properties of underlying neural populations coding for causality. Data from 12 subjects, recruited in two different laboratories, consistently showed that prolonged viewing of perceptual causal events results in a substantial negative aftereffect on the judgment of subsequent ambiguous events. These causality aftereffects are spatially specific, affecting only those locations that were adapted, and could not be explained by adaptation to other low-level features, like motion or contrast. Our results provide strong support for hard-wired channels in retinotopic cortex that implement visual routines for the analysis of fairly complex, and seemingly high-level features of visual scenes: cause and effect in perceptual events.