A Causal Feeling: How Kinesthetic Haptics Affects Causal Perception

Abstract

While haptic feedback is vital to how we gather information in the world, most research on causal perception has focused on visual information. To assess how haptics affects people’s perception of causal events, we ran a psychophysical study modeled after Michotte’s launching paradigm. Participants watched trains move on the screen and judged whether one train caused the other to move, with half the trials providing 1-DoF kinesthetic haptic feedback synchronized to the motion of the second train. We manipulated the temporal offsets between when the first train stopped and the second train started. The results show that adding haptic feedback increases causal perception for events with positive offsets.