Does the “Why” Tell Us the “When”?

Traditional approaches to human causal reasoning assume that the perception of temporal order informs judgments of causal structure. In this article, we present two experiments in which people followed the opposite inferential route: Perceptual judgments of temporal order were instead influenced by causal beliefs. By letting participants freely interact with a software-based “physics world,” we induced stable causal beliefs that subsequently determined participants’ reported temporal order of events, even when this led to a reversal of the objective temporal order. We argue that for short timescales, even when temporal-resolution capabilities suffice, the perception of temporal order is distorted to fit existing causal beliefs.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Psychology Science

• Publication date

  2013-06-26

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/0956797613476046PMID 23804958PMCID 4107838
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• The temporal priority principle: at what age does this develop?

  2013cited by this paper
• Understanding the Past, Predicting the Future

  2012cited by this paper
• Causal learning and inference as a rational process: the new synthesis.

  2011cited by this paper
• Effect before Cause: Supramodal Recalibration of Sensorimotor Timing

  2009influential reference
• Causal Binding of Actions to Their Effects

  2009cited by this paper
• Temporal information and children's and adults' causal inferences

  2009cited by this paper
• Proceedings of the 29th Annual Cognitive Science Society

  2007cited by this paper
• Causal beliefs influence the perception of temporal order

  2007cited by this paper
• Time as a guide to cause.

  2006cited by this paper
• Motor-sensory recalibration leads to an illusory reversal of action and sensation.

  2006cited by this paper
• Temporal delays can facilitate causal attribution: Towards a general timeframe bias in causal induction

  2006cited by this paper
• Time and experience

  2006cited by this paper
• How well is causal structure inferred from cooccurrence information?

  2006cited by this paper
• Illusory Causal Crescents: Misperceived Spatial Relations Due to Perceived Causality

  2004cited by this paper
• The advantage of timely intervention.

  2004cited by this paper
• Temporal order judgement for auditory and visual stimuli.

  2002cited by this paper
• Voluntary action and conscious awareness

  2002cited by this paper
• An enquiry concerning human understanding ; A dissertation on the passions ; An enquiry concerning the principles of morals ; and, The natural history of religion

  2002cited by this paper
• THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING AND M·OTIVATION

  2001cited by this paper
• Directed attention and perception of temporal order.

  1991cited by this paper
• Associative Accounts of Causality Judgment

  1988cited by this paper
• Preschool Children's Assumptions about Cause and Effect: Temporal Ordering.

  1979cited by this paper
• Perceived order in different sense modalities.

  1961cited by this paper
• The Principles of Psychology

  year unknowncited by this paper

• Recalibration of perceived agency transfers across modalities

  2025cites this paper
• Perceived gaze dynamics in social interactions can alter (and even reverse) the perceived temporal order of events.

  2024cites this paper
• Evaluating the Bayesian causal inference model of intentional binding through computational modeling

  2024cites this paper
• Les espaces analogiques

  2023cites this paper
• Human Vision Reconstructs Time to Satisfy Causal Constraints

  2022cites this paper
• What Causes Harmful Algal Blooms? A Case Study of Causal Attributions and Conflict in a Lakeshore Community

  2022cites this paper
• Finding patterns in policy questions

  2022cites this paper
• Running Title : Temporal Binding in Children

  2022cites this paper
• What over When in causal agency: Causal experience prioritizes outcome prediction over temporal priority.

  2022cites this paper
• Feeling the past: beyond causal content

  2021cites this paper
• Audiomotor Temporal Recalibration Modulates Decision Criterion of Self-Agency but Not Perceptual Sensitivity

  2021cites this paper
• A Psychological Approach to Causal Understanding and the Temporal Asymmetry

  2020cites this paper
• Causal actions enhance perception of continuous body movements.

  2020cites this paper
• The distinct contributions of cause–effect order and reasoning type in judgments of causality

  2020cites this paper
• Causal Beliefs and Perception of Temporal Order: The ‘Reordering Effect’

  2020cites this paper
• Mapping conditional scenarios for knowledge structuring in (tail) dependence elicitation

  2020cites this paper
• Temporal Binding, Causation, and Agency: Developing a New Theoretical Framework

  2020cites this paper
• Author accepted manuscript: The Developmental Profile of Temporal Binding: From Childhood to Adulthood.

  2020cites this paper
• A Psychological Approach to Causal Understanding and the Temporal Asymmetry

  2020cites this paper
• Causality and Time: An Introductory Typology

  2019cites this paper
• Causality Guides Time Perception

  2019cites this paper
• The Direction of Causation

  2019cites this paper
• Causality influences children's and adults' experience of temporal order.

  2019influential citation
• Temporalization in Causal Modeling

  2019cites this paper
• Do Facts Speak for Themselves? Causes and Consequences of Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs

  2019cites this paper
• Causation, Time Asymmetry, and Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences

  2019cites this paper
• Time–Event Relationships as Representations for Constructing Cell Mechanisms

  2019cites this paper
• Reintroducing Dynamics into Static Causal Models

  2019cites this paper
• Index

  2019cites this paper
• Time and Causality across the Sciences

  2019cites this paper
• Overcoming the Poverty of Mechanism in Causal Models

  2019cites this paper
• An Introduction to Time and Causality

  2019cites this paper
• Intervening in Time

  2019cites this paper
• Causation in a Physical World: An Overview of Our Emerging Understanding

  2019cites this paper
• On the Causal Nature of Time

  2019cites this paper
• 1 Intervening in Time

  2018cites this paper
• When causality shapes the experience of time: Evidence for temporal binding in young children.

  2018cites this paper
• Influencing factors and thought of temporal order perception

  2018cites this paper
• Motivated Responding in Studies of Factual Learning

  2018cites this paper
• Causal Action: A Fundamental Constraint on Perception and Inference About Body Movements

  2017cites this paper
• Constructing the world: Active causal learning in cognition

  2017cites this paper
• Causal Context Presented in Subsequent Event Modifies the Perceived Timing of Cause and Effect

  2017cites this paper
• Motivated Responding in Studies of Factual Learning

  2017cites this paper
• Motivated Responding in Studies of Factual Learning ∗ February 11 , 2017

  2017cites this paper
• Eliciting Multivariate Uncertainty from Experts: Considerations and Approaches Along the Expert Judgement Process

  2017cites this paper
• Learning to infer the time of our actions and decisions from their consequences.

  2017cites this paper
• Running head: TIME IN CAUSAL STRUCTURE LEARNING 1 Time in Causal Structure Learning

  2017cites this paper
• Temporal perception in joint action: This is MY action.

  2016cites this paper
• Time, agency, and sensory feedback delays during action

  2016cites this paper
• Time reordered: Causal perception guides the interpretation of temporal order.

  2016influential citation
• Causal Learning: Understanding the World

  2016cites this paper
• Causal Thinking in Judgments

  2015cites this paper
• Causality in thought.

  2015cites this paper
• Effects can precede their cause in the sense of agency.

  2014cites this paper
• Context and Animacy Play a Role in Dynamic Decision-Making

  2013cites this paper