Eye-tracking causality

How do people make causal judgments? What role, if any, does counterfactual simulation play? Counterfactual theories of causal judgments predict that people compare what actually happened with what would have happened if the candidate cause had been absent. Process theories predict that people focus only on what actually happened, to assess the mechanism linking candidate cause and outcome. We tracked participants' eye movements while they judged whether one billiard ball caused another one to go through a gate or prevented it from going through. Both participants' looking patterns and their judgments demonstrated that counterfactual simulation played a critical role. Participants simulated where the target ball would have gone if the candidate cause had been removed from the scene. The more certain participants were that the outcome would have been different, the stronger their causal judgments. These results provide the first direct evidence for spontaneous counterfactual simulation in an important domain of high-level cognition.

如何进行因果判断？反事实模拟在其中扮演着何种角色，若有之？因果判断的反事实理论预测，人们会将实际发生的事件与若候选原因不存在时将发生的事件进行比较。过程理论预测，人们仅关注实际发生的事件，以评估候选原因与结果之间的机制联系。我们在参与者判断一枚台球是否导致另一枚台球通过一个通道或阻止其通过的过程中，追踪了他们的眼动。参与者的注视模式和他们的判断均表明，反事实模拟发挥着至关重要的作用。参与者模拟了若候选原因从场景中移除，目标球将去向何方的情形。参与者对结果将不同这一情况的确定性越强，他们的因果判断就越强烈。这些结果为在高级认知领域自发反事实模拟提供了首份直接证据。